The need for cultivating a more data-driven culture is on the rise. Business decisions can no longer be made in silos, based purely on gut feel. Rapid changes in technology have created a more competitive environment that demands decisions to be made swiftly and to be informed with data. Creating a strong data-driven culture within your company requires that you commit to collecting data, analyzing it, and using it as the basis for making decisions.
You won’t always have the right data or enough of it to make all decisions, and even the more informed decisions won’t be able to be made with complete certainty. But that’s not the goal. The goal is helping to ensure that your powerful leaders are armed with the most information possible to aid their own experience and intuition in making decisions. With equipped leaders making good decisions, your business can start to experience the benefits of a data-driven culture. Operations will become more efficient, you’ll become an authority in your field, you’ll be more in tune with your customer base, your go-to-market efforts will be more lucrative, and you’ll future proof your business.
Conducting studies and performing analyses within your company’s area of expertise can help establish you as a trusted authority. Publishing this data-driven content publicly can help professionals in your field stay up to date on key trends and drive traffic to your site as a reliable source for unique data insights.
Since data can be confusing to look at, especially to the untrained eye, it is important to present the information in an easy-to-read manner. If you decide this strategy of delivering data insights publicly fits your business model, one valuable way to display your content is through the use of embedded analytics. Embedded analytics is an effective means to make reporting more accessible and provide more value to your stakeholders.
To become a trusted source for data insights, try creating a few data-driven content pieces to see if you can increase traffic and engagement with viewers. If you’re successful, you can establish your company as a trusted brand for reliable data insights, which in turn can drive significant revenue expansion, especially if your business offering revolves around data analytics.
A strong data-driven culture can also improve the efficiency of your company’s operations. Using data to analyze internal operations can help you determine where improvements can be made. Perhaps you discover that your support team is spending too much time resolving support tickets for your smallest customers and decide to implement a tiered support approach. Or maybe you learn that the average custom development project results in 30% more work than your team originally scoped, so you begin to add in a buffer to your work estimates to account for scope creep.
In these examples, analyzing company data for insights can influence major decisions critical to company success. Without a data-driven culture that empowers internal data teams, you risk flying blind to improvements that are right under your fingertips. In our experience, employing an internal business intelligence team is a great way to place an emphasis on analyzing company data in effort to drive growth.
Tracking consumer behavior can help companies understand how their customers judge their products and services and help them identify areas for improvement. Collecting such data can help you find gaps within the market and set you apart from the competition. But more importantly, seeking this feedback directly from your customers also lets them know that their opinion is valued. If customers are involved in setting the roadmap for product improvements, they’re more likely to stick around long term.
A data-driven culture can also help your company find more effective marketing strategies. With the rise of social media and digital advertising, it is becoming increasingly easier to gather analytics and measure marketing ROI. Many platforms have some form of native analytics that can be helpful to gather insights at a glance. More advanced analysts can also combine the data across platforms to create a holistic view into how all sales and marketing efforts are performing.
Once you have an understanding of the strategies that are working and the ones that aren’t, you can begin to target your efforts so that each dollar is best spent. Such insights would include which channels are most effective, what messages are resonating, what an ideal budget is, expected payback, etc.
The last reason why your company can benefit from cultivating a data-driven culture is setting up your business to be future proof. In a global pandemic like Covid brought on, one of the core reasons many businesses were able to continue operations was by using data to understand how their business would be affected and what actions they could take.
Relying on numbers and statistics will help you be more prepared for a sudden change in trends so you won’t have the rug pulled out from under you. Having data analytics will help you predict whether or not a big change like this is coming again in the future and will aid you in creating contingencies that will keep your business stable.
Cultivating a culture where data is a valued asset, is an important strategy to grow and sustain your business long-term. At Numerro, we use data to set our product roadmap, determine where to spend our sales and marketing budget, stay up-to-date on key trends in the Power BI market, and identify ways to improve our internal operations so that ultimately, our customers will benefit from a product that continues to deliver value for years to come.
Guest post by Alicia Scott
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