Data is all around us. From sales to marketing, HR, and logistics, using data to make strategic decisions can give a business all the tools needed to gain an advantage over competitors. In today’s modern environment, data is not just a bunch of numbers and Excel spreadsheets, it is a way to get to know your organization on a deeper level. Here we will cover 5 ways in which you can make data your strategic advantage.
1. Informed and speedy decision-making
The use of data from various internal and external sources allows businesses to support their most important strategic and operational decisions with actual facts instead of simple intuition. With markets becoming more crowded and competitive by the day, shooting in the dark when it comes to making critical decisions is simply not possible. Businesses who understand how to extract the maximum potential out of their data, with the help of the right techniques and tools, stand to gain a great competitive advantage.
2. Accessible tools
Expanding on the point above, many businesses fail to make data their strategic advantage because employees don’t have the needed skills and the company doesn’t invest in the right tools. With the boom of data, a wide range of self-service analytics tools have emerged to make data management an easier task. One of the most popular ones is data dashboards. with the help of interactive graphs and charts that make the data understandable for any user without the need for any technical knowledge. That said, to extract the maximum potential out of these tools it is necessary to follow some key best practices regarding dashboard design. This way, you will make sure that everyone intuitively understands the data and uses it to support their work process.
3. Customer insights
Maintaining competitive advantage through product differentiation is hard in today’s business context. A couple of months after an innovative product launch into the market, competitors will already start selling their own versions. To differentiate from the pack, customer experience is the way to go. While it might seem like a challenging task, it is actually not that hard. Customers interact with our businesses in many ways and leave us with valuable data in the process. By analyzing their purchasing history, where they live, what they like, how they interact with customer service and your different promotional content, you will get a full picture of what your targeted customer expects from you. This way you can stay one step ahead and provide them with exactly what they like before they even asked.
4. Product optimization
Another great way to make data your strategic advantage relates to product optimization. In the past, businesses who wanted to look at the success of a product needed to wait for the number of sales. Nowadays, there are many ways in which you can identify what your customers like and what they don’t. For instance, you can analyze return reasons, positive and negative reviews, the conversions of a specific marketing campaign, and social media interactions, . Monitoring all this data constantly will allow your production department to design products or services that are directly targeting your customer’s interest which will lead to an improved shopping experience.
5. Boost sales
While product optimization and customer experience are fundamental when it comes to gaining a competitive advantage, the ultimate goal for any company is to actually sell. There is a when it comes to sales data. By closely looking into your CRM data, website behaviors, as well as marketing and social media performance, you can build a bigger picture of where your sales are coming from. You can even use predictive analytics to analyze your sales history and see what customers bought and when. This allows you to forecast when they are more likely to buy again and plan production accordingly as well as cross-sell opportunities that will boost sales.
As you can see, there is so much you can do with data. Here we just covered a few fundamental points of the endless scope of benefits data analysis can bring. The important takeaway is to understand that, when implemented correctly, using the right strategies and tools, data-driven businesses stand to gain a great advantage over their competitors.