Data is the new oil. It is the most valuable commodity of our time. Data has been used by companies for decades to predict customer behavior and make better business decisions.

It is now easier than ever to collect data to help you better understand your customers and streamline your business.

Data analytics enables businesses to make data-driven decisions that power key strategic initiatives and improve the company’s relationship with both customers and business partners. To fully benefit from data, you must understand how to extract the most value from it.

Data is important to any business because it provides insight into what is going on. It can be used to make decisions and take the right actions.

Here are five simple ways data can help businesses of all sizes, particularly SMBs.

1. Data enables you to make smarter decisions.

Businesses of all sizes generate data. Any organization that has a website and a social media presence is gathering information about its web traffic, customer demographics, user habits, and more. All of that data has huge potential if you can figure out how to access and leverage it.

While there are many factors to consider when making a decision, it is more credible to have hard data to back you up.

When data is used correctly, SMBs can gain the same benefits as larger organizations.

Data can be used by businesses to make decisions about how to improve customer service, how to increase customer retention, how to find new customers, how to predict sales trends, how to better manage marketing efforts, and how to track social media interactions, to name a few.

2. Data enables you to improve processes.

‍Waste has a serious impact on every business. It depletes resources, wastes time, and hurts the bottom line.

Data allows you to better comprehend and optimize critical business processes, allowing you to save money and time.

A poorly executed marketing initiative, for example, can be one of the most costly wastes of a company’s resources. However, by analyzing data on how different marketing channels function, you can determine which ones provide the best return on investment and concentrate your efforts there. Alternatively, you may investigate why other channels aren’t functioning well and attempt to optimize their performance. This would allow you to expand your lead generation budget without having to increase your advertising spending.

3. Data helps you solve problems.

How do you establish what went wrong when you have a slow sales month or a poor-performing marketing campaign? Data from business processes may be tracked and reviewed to evaluate performance breakdowns. This allows your organization to better understand the different phases of a process and determine which steps are doing well and which ones need to be modified.

The top-performing companies are data-driven, and this helps set them apart from their counterparts.

4. Data helps you understand performance.

In simple terms, data contributes to the evaluation of performance. Sports teams are a good example of organizations that collect performance data to improve their teams. There isn’t a professional team today that doesn’t have a data collection and analysis team to help track, support, and improve on-field performance.

The team of analysts is constantly updating data about who’s doing what well and how that can help the team excel overall.

Data collection and analysis can help reveal how well customer service, marketing efforts, individual departments, and your company as a whole are performing.

5. Data helps you understand consumers.

How do you know who your customers are if you don’t have data? How can you tell if consumers love your services or if your marketing efforts are working? How can you know how much money you make or spend? Understanding your clients and the addressable market requires data.

However, if you don’t have the necessary tools to help you interpret all of your data, it’s easy to get lost in it. Business intelligence (BI) software tailored to SMBs is the ideal solution to collect and analyze customer data so you can use it to boost sales.

Data is important to any business because it helps provide insights that paint a clear picture of the efficacy of your processes. It can be used to make better decisions and take the right actions. If you’re not using data to uncover insights that will guide your business into the future, you will become a business of the past.

Fortunately, the advances in data processing and visualization make growing your business with data easier than ever. Contact us today to see how we can help you bring clarity to your business.