We all know that data plays an important role in business. In fact, data plays a role in just about all of our lives. But what role does data play in your business, and how do you know what to prioritize?
We asked eight small business owners, marketing professionals and experts about what piece of data is most important to their business. Learn how they segment their data and use it in their decision making to help further their organizations.
Prioritize By Time
At first, look at all files for which might be of similar importance. There is one question that helps to segment and prioritize them: “How long can you be without these files?” The most time-critical need specific protection, like a failover or cloning solution, where no restore process is necessary. Less time-critical files can be protected with a regular backup to disk, tape or cloud. There is also data that has a tolerance of one or more days to be restored; this is a candidate for long-term archiving to tape or cloud. Archiware P5 helps to protect all categories offering archive, backup and cloning in one solution.
Dr. Marc M. Batschkus, Archiware
Driving Sales
Ecommerce revenue and Conversion rates are what matters most to my business. Is something working and driving more revenue to my business? Or is my marketing campaign or blog post content falling short of driving sales or new prospect sign-ups? Regularly reviewing and using data in Google Analytics not only helps you become a better marketer but a better business owner as well.
Vanessa Molica, The Lash Professional
Customers Segmentation
We’ve developed internal metrics to help define which customers are the most engaged users. This number is based on the number of job postings they have made with us. If they have one job posting, obviously they are a “new” customer. If they have posted several times on numerous occasions, then they are a “sticky” customer because they come back. But, if a customer has posted jobs at a certain level, then they fall into our “super sticky” category. Having data and measurements enables us to segment customers, and align our messaging to achieve our objectives.
Zack McCarty, Qwick
Commonalities
Standing alone, data is not very useful. But when data is combined into sets, then someone can come along and use data to identify commonalities within their organization. If you want data to play an important role in your business, make sure that data is combined with similar sets and analyzed for key performance indicators.
Francesca Yardley, Threads
Predict Consumer Behavior
When the pandemic hit, we knew our clients in rentals and events were going to be hit hard. But we also knew that our clients in other industries would benefit. Analyzing industry trends and data enabled us to shift focus on industries where equipment financing deals can take place. For any business looking to shift focus, I’d recommend taking a look at industry trends to help predict consumer behavior.
Carey Wilbur, Rental Equipment Financing
Website Traffic
The most important piece of data for my business is website traffic. We are a company that generates revenue by channeling our audience to our affiliate partners. We thus need our website to attract massive interest and increase our audience. Once we get the data, we segment it by channels of traffic. Which channels of traffic (e.g., organic search and social media) are bringing adequate traffic and which channels are failing. We then proceed to implement strategies to boost the failing channels.
Reuben Yonatan, GetVoIP
Discovering New Campaigns
As an eCommerce business, our website data is critically important to our success. The difference between sessions and users is quite significant. Simply put, a user is a unique visitor, where a session is simply a visit. We can use data from sessions to understand what landing page is working the best by measuring the bounce rate and conversion rate. User data helps us understand what the user wants, by learning what pages they are most interested in. This helps us understand if we have an opportunity to create a campaign that lands a customer on a high converting page with a low bounce rate. I believe a session is a more important metric to measure because it shows us the return on our marketing investment.
Brian Lim, INTO THE AM
Missed Opportunities
Being successful is sometimes a result of recognizing where others are falling short. Data brings those shortcomings to light. If you look in the right places, recognize the trends, and do something about it, you’ll be able to capitalize on the missed opportunities from competitors.
Brett Farmiloe, SEO Agency