Use Data To Grow Your Business // Data Intelligence For SMEs.

It is no longer a piece of news that the world is digital and global now. The digital trend has made data intelligence more important than ever before. Its need has gone beyond storing, but processing, updating and analyzing. If you have started thinking, What have SMEs got to do with data? Why do SMEs need data? What do I do with data? How do I get data? Where do I get data? Beware, you can even end up having too much data to process. At the end of it all, data gives you a better understanding of your business and customers. Here is how; 

  1. Make key strategic decisions with data
  2. Data Helps You retain customers and get new ones
  3. Data Assist In Efficient Monitoring Of Performance
  4. Data Helps In Problem Detection and Solution
  5. Data Can Help SMEs Prevent Wastage
Make Key Strategic Decisions With Data

Gathering data helps any business including SMEs to make better decisions. As a matter of fact, SMEs have a better capacity to quickly make use of the data gathered, because of their agile nature. Data gathering is very important for SMEs to improve the relationship between both customers and business partners, however, there are ethics around these activities that must be considered. Remember to read our blog on social entrepreneurship DNA to understand the basics. 

Mind you, to make the best of data, you must know how to get the best value from your gathered data. Let’s consider these five ways data can advance your business.

Data Helps You retain customers and get new ones

Get the consent of your customer before you have their information securely gathered for your internal use. Knowing who to target makes it clear about the kind of target strategy you would require. It becomes easier to find new customers. Qualitative data would allow you to develop methods to retain the existing customer as you get to understand what they truly want or desire. Therefore your customer retention ability is increased. 

You can improve your customer service and carry out more effective marketing efforts. It cannot be overemphasized that customer management is highly dependent on data gathered and stored. Really, without data, how do you determine who your customers are? How do you know if they are satisfied with your products, or if your marketing strategies are effective? 

Data Assist In Efficient Monitoring Of Performance

If you are not sure of how well your employees or marketing is performing, how will you know if your resources (money) is being efficiently utilized and if it’s yielding profit.

A data-driven business has the potential to excel better than the one without data. Data helps you to identify performance level and efficiency of your team, department, marketing efforts, customer service, logistics or other aspects of your business or company. Collecting data and reviewing the collected data would help determine how each unit is performing and what needs to be done to improve performance. 

Data Helps In Problem Detection and Solution

When a business is experiencing poor performance in areas of marketing, sales, or even campaign. Today, with the availability of data, it has become easier to detect what went wrong. By tracking and reviewing data from the business processes, which then would help to uncover performance breakdowns, and give a better understanding of each part of the process and discover which phase needs improvement and which is performing excellently.

Data Can Help SMEs Prevent Wastage

If there is anything any business that succeeds did right, it’s surely shunning wastage. It is therefore imperative for a business with the vision of expanding, to block every channel of wastage. How then do you determine these channels, it can only be done through storing, processing and analyzing data. Moreso, every business enterprise feels the effect of wastage. It depletes resources. Waste makes ducks and drakes of time and has an ever touching impact on all lines of business, especially the bottom line. 

Data helps to detect a problem. Take for instance a marketing campaign that is bringing in less ROI (Return On Investment), this will then be used to prepare a budget without increasing spending but exploring better ways to increase ROI, generate more leads, and even solve the problem of why a certain marketing channel is not working.

Practical examples where/how data is used to build your small business. 

A typical example is an online campaign that is receiving more engagement and generating sales. Compared to another marketing strategy that is taking in more money, but generating less sales. It’s the availability of data that would make it possible for you to discover and analyze this issue.  

Another example is the Manager 1 gets more leads from the company but have less percentage of conversion. Manager 2 gets fewer leads from the company but has a higher percentage of conversion. Data would help the company to then determine who should get more supply of leads from the company.

Where (8 Channels) and how to get data

As a small business, you can focus on 3 major data sets, namely; customer data, internal data of your business and market landscape data. In our Joadre app, we have created some data sets and would continually expand on these. We would publish lots of tutorials to guide you as a small business owner about how to gather information and how to use this information. Our goal is to help you brush up your skill in regards to data and digital intelligence. For now, let’s focus on customer data. Customer data can come as a combination from all your interaction channels like;

  1. Social media
  2. Newsletter
  3. In-person interaction
  4. Product purchase
  5. Electronic payments of any kind collect data about customers
  6. Reviews
  7. Website usage, traffic
  8. Survey and many more.
Wrap up

All that data generated knowingly and unknowingly from these channels are filled with potential if you can learn to utilize it efficiently. How do you determine your revenues and expenditures without the availability of data? It therefore resonates with the importance of data in analysing and understanding the relationship between the consumers and the market.

SMEs must invest in data procurement today to have a seat at the table now and in the future. Any SME that has not started uncovering insights from data will soon become a business of yesterday. Tap into data processing tools, which makes business growth easier. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive amazing business insights from us As in dey hot! Get our App for future business ideas and partnerships opportunities. Never miss out!

Cheers

Joadre Editorial Team

Joadre Editorial
Joadre Editorialhttp://www.joadre.com
Joadre Editorial team is an international mix of experts in the field of human rights, entrepreneurship and global politics. We are passionate to educate and create equity for Africans and the Africa continent.

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