Data and Analytics
High-quality data and well-constructed analytics are crucial for the growth of every business. Data-driven decision-making should be a well-thought out strategy for every business big and small.
It's said with every dollar invested in creating a data system the economic benefit equates to an average of $32 return.* As experienced Marketing, Sales and Operations specialists we have seen the exponential growth of our own business along with our clients using the power of well constructed data and analytics to drive growth.
With access to a huge range of reporting platforms there is always one to suit your budget and size and getting an expert to set them up properly can empower you in more ways than one.
Data and analytics can reveal insights and opportunities that owners or executives had not previously considered. It supports a model of decision making, that is based on facts and metrics that can prescribe how to proceed. We can set targets and goals through key performance indicators (KPIs) that allow us to incrementally change and measure our business model.
How can Data and Analytics help Business Growth?
Business analytics is the systematic use of data to achieve a competitive advantage. Using data and analytics to tracking, measuring, and analysing customer behaviours, identifying customer needs and strengths, and predicting future trends. It is an important tool to increase your competitive advantage as well as provide insight into your business operations and a way to measure and improve your processes.
For each type of business there are different data analytics metrics to measure and assess for its own model. This then determines the projects and resources that are required to grow that opportunity.
For SaaS
For Software as a Service businesses, the main form of success measurements are provided by measuring their monthly or annual user subscription revenue as well as their onboarding rates and churn.
Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) or Annual recurring revenue (ARR) are two of the most important success criteria metrics for a SaaS company to measure. For both a sales and marketing team within a SaaS company this type of metric helps them improve their user bases, set sales targets for incentive based sales quarters as well as provide their executive team with a way of forecasting and analysing their business growth over a period of time.
Churn is when a customer using a SaaS platform cancels their recurring subscription.
As churn is directly tied to a SaaS company’s revenue, it is extremely important for business owners and operations managers to understand when and why it is happening. Luckily, analytics tools today can break down subscription related data and can provide recommendations on how to retain customers and reduce churn.
For SaaS Marketeers, a set of metrics that measure the cost per acquisition (CPA), the conversion rate as well as click through rate from their marketing campaigns is critical to understand how their advertising and customer engagement campaigns are working to generate the right leads for their sales team.
This is where integrating into a CRM like HubSpot can be invaluable to combine both sales and marketing efforts to create reports on this end to end process.
For Professional Services
The majority of Professional Service businesses today are advertising online through either Google Ads, Facebook or LinkedIn.
What a lot of business owners don’t realise, is that the ads they are running are generating extremely useful data which provides insights into the customer and their intentions.
Data and Analytics services can help to break down the data and identify trends or areas of improvements in your online advertising.
Analysing cost per lead by channel and advert allows you to balance a good return for your advertising campaigns as well as attracting more customers.
By consolidating your data from your website conversions and advertising into concise dashboard business owners and their marketing teams can quickly assess where gains can be made or costs can be reduced.
Example of a customised client dashboard build by Do Good Things
For eCommerce
eCommerce growth depends on the amount of products purchased by customers that interact with your website. The key word here being ‘interact’ - data can be collected along the entire journey of your customer, from when they click onto your home page to when they add to cart.
Collecting and analysing this data can provide powerful insights into your target customer.
Key performance indicators (KPI) such as shopping cart abandonment rate, conversion rate and cost of customer acquisition can be determined using data analytics.
Once determined, marketing executives and business owners can set goals to improve these key metrics by enhancing the customer journey or by other means.
Through data analytics, KPIs can be hit month after month, resulting in increased sales and growth for the company.
What are the Components of Data and Analytics Strategy
Strategic planning for data and analytics consists of the following steps:
- Establish what type of data and analytics will be needed to align with the organisation’s goals; this includes the metrics that will be considered KPI targets, the value, and measures for success and failure.
- Establish the data sources you will have to include - will it be a centralised solution or exclusive to one department.
- Create a plan including research on the type of dashboards you would need, the software and infrastructure that can be used to support your reporting and the costs.
- Gaining buy-in that your plan is fit for purpose from the users as well as the execs.
By following the above steps, businesses can implement a Data & Analytics strategy that increases growth by finding gaps in their current data architecture and ecosystem.
Which Marketing Data Can Be Obtained Through Data Analytics?
The more data you collect from a wide range of sources, the more you can learn about your target audience, how they interact with your campaigns and your spend control. There is a huge amount of marketing data out there so being able to consolidate that into clear reporting is vital to the performance of your marketing. Here are the top things to consider when building out your reporting tool kit.
Global and Local Search Volume for Keywords Surrounding Your Industry
Search Engine Optimisation reporting allow you to understand where your business ranks against competitors in your industry in Google's search ranking. The higher you are on the list of important search terms your customers will be using to find a service like yours, the more authority your business will have.
This will also increase your organic search volume as you will gain higher click through onto your website resulting more leads.
With in-depth analysis of search data and understanding what customers are looking for in regards to your industry you can implement managed SEO strategy to increase your 'free' traffic to your site.
With tools like Ahrefs you can see where you rank for search terms and how much traffic you are receiving over time allowing you to track changes in performance you have made to increase your sites visibility and qualified leads.
Cost Per Acquisition - the Return on Investment from Your Advertising.
Key measurements for the Marketing department and their executives consist of how much it costs to gain qualified leads and customers through their advertising. By tracking the value of those leads as well allows you to influence the revenue generated by those campaigns by enhancing your offering.
Digital Marketing Advertising platforms like Facebook, Google and LinkedIn as well programs like Google Analytics or Data Studio allow you to track, measure and improve this spend. You can set up tests to assess changes in audience or advert to understand how to get the best return for your investment.
Having a central reporting hub or dashboard allows you to see how each advertising channel and campaign affects your overall performance so that you can dial up and down the advertising spend depending on its success.
Customer Behaviour
Customer behaviour data is an example of a valuable data set. Information about customer affinities, such as interest in particular activities, products, or topics, can be collected from data sources. For email marketing, when a customer signs up for your email list, they are showing interest in your brand. By reading content on your website, they may also indirectly express an interest in the subject.
Every interaction your customer makes with your website, email newsletter , social media advertisement or blog can now be tracked and stored as data.
This data is invaluable as it gives you an insight into the mind of your customer. Changes can be made to campaigns over time to increase clicks and interaction, resulting in more sales and increased growth.
Data such as time spent on your home page, what links were clicked and how long they stayed on your website can be collected. With this knowledge of how your customers interact with your website, you are able to make it easier to navigate and improve the user journey. This may lead to more customers acting on your call-to-action which can lead to more sales.
Example of a customised client dashboard build by Do Good Things
Customer Demographics
It's possible to learn more about which groups of people are interested in your brand, content, or products by combining this information with your current customers' demographics. Customers' ages, sexes, income brackets, marital status, and other personal details are all examples of demographic data.
Through marketing data analysis, you might learn that your product is most popular amongst those aged 18-35. You may have more female purchases compared to male. When you focus on multiple characteristics, you can create niche groups of people who are more likely to make a purchase. With this data, you can better tailor your advertisements and content to the specific audiences you're trying to reach.
Customer Loyalty
Retention rates specially for the likes of a SaaS subscription service or eCommerce are vital to sustain a business. Loyal customers know your business and see value in your service. By measuring KPIs like retention rate and conversely the negative rates like churn rate and return rate you can measure the performance of your product and service and make adjustments to improve your offering.
Need Help Calibrating Accurate Marketing & Sales Data into Reporting Dashboards?
Get in touch with us, we are Marketing data & CRM specialists. We can provide customised dashboards to make it easy to understand your metrics and improve you ROI.
The Top Reasons Why Your Company Should Use Data & Analytics
Why Data and Analytics are Important for Business:
- To create a smoother user experience
- To Increase Return on Investment
- Improve your sales & inventory processes
- Manage risk & recovery
- Improve security
Data & analytics is the key to unlocking the value hidden in the vast trove of information generated by businesses. The use of data analytics can aid a company in many ways, from gaining more customers with its marketing strategies, increasing their revenue to locating and eliminating potential threats to the company's success. Here are five reasons why data analytics is useful.
Use Digital Marketing Reports to Create a Smooth User Experience for Your Customer
Customer data is gathered from various sources, including traditional stores, online marketplaces, and social media. Using data analytics, businesses can compile in-depth profiles of their customers based on this information, allowing them to understand their needs better and improve their marketing activities and product offering.
Businesses that combine social media page analytics with transactional data can better promote products their customers are already interested in through paid advertising. This marketing strategy can be informed by a digital marketing report and other marketing reports that give insight into marketing performance.
By applying behavioural analytics models to customer information, businesses can enhance the customer experience on their website right through into Customer Service.
An example of this could be the use of predictive models to analyse data from an online store's transactions and decide which products to recommend to customers as they complete their purchases.
Increase Return on Investment
Analysing business marketing data can help companies reduce wasteful spending and maximise profits. In addition, both prescriptive and predictive analytics can help businesses respond to unforeseen events and shifts in the market. For example, a data report for social media marketing can provide insights on trends, recommending paths for your marketing team to take.
A company can model the impact of price or product changes on demand. Altering a product's offering and then conducting a split test to see which version performs better is a great way to put these models' predictions to the test. Digital marketing reports can help to form core marketing strategy and advice on ad spend for your primary marketing channels.
To decide whether or not to implement the modifications company-wide, decision-makers can examine sales data from the modified products using data analytics software.
Use Data Analytics to Improve Your Supply Chain and Inventory Management
Analysing your supply chain and inventory data and comparing it to your rate of sale can improve your processes and improve productivity.
Supply chain data analysis can provide insight into potential future issues based on high sales compared to the stock coming in. For example, suppose a company's demand projections reveal that a given supplier won't be able to meet holiday season demand. In that case, the company could find a new supplier to help meet the increased demand or dial back spend to ensure they do not have an ‘out of stock’ issue.
In addition, many companies, especially in the retail sector, find it difficult to achieve optimal inventory levels. Incorporating data analytics into the decision-making process can help businesses find the best way to stock their shelves year-round, considering variables like seasonality and secular trends.
Manage Risk and Recovery
Taking a risk is a part of doing business.
Data analytics allows businesses to make riskier decisions and back up with data analysis. Years of data can be used to create forecasting models, allowing predictions to be made. Owners and operations managers are more likely to make decisions for the good of the business if it's based on data over a previous period of time.
When it comes to identifying and mitigating potential threats, data analytics can be invaluable. Theft by customers or staff, uncollected receivables, threats to staff safety, and legal liability fall into this category.
By identifying these risks early, systems can be put in place to reduce these potential threats.
These systems could be internal processes for employees or software related. Less time and resources will have to be devoted to firefighting when issues come to a head and these resources can then be directed back into improving the growth of the company.
In the aftermath of a negative event, data analytics can help businesses recover minimising the damage. For example, if a company has overestimated the demand for a product, data analytics can be used to establish the best price for a clearance sale. Statistical models can be built to automatically guide businesses on how to address persistent issues.
Increased Safety
Data security risks affect every company. By analysing and visualising historical data, businesses can determine what factors led to data breaches that have already occurred. For instance, IT departments can use data analytics programs to read, process, and display audit logs to trace the origins and spread of an attack. The data will aid in finding security holes so that they can be fixed.
Statistical models are another tool available to IT security teams for thwarting future intrusion attempts. When an attack is based on a large amount of data being processed, like a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, abnormal access behaviour is commonly used. These models can be configured to run indefinitely, with monitoring and alerting systems to flag and highlight anomalies that require immediate attention from security professionals.
Need Better Data and Analytics?
As you can see, there are a number of reasons why your company should be using both Business and Marketing Analytics - however this is easier said than done.
Integrating data from Marketing Analytics into your current system or setting up a CRM to give you the end to end solution can be harder than you think without the right guidance.
At Do Good Things, we are a digital marketing agency, who are Marketing Analytics and CRM specialists and implement analytics solutions for businesses like yours regularly.
We can help you craft a full end to end solution, integrating your software, CRM into clean, tailored reporting suites so you can gain better insights. Contact us today.
Complexities In Data Analysis
Implementing a data analytics strategy provides many benefits, however this also comes with its share of difficulties.
Data collection and data integration is one of the most difficult aspects of data analytics. Businesses have to decide which data to collect first. Understanding which tools and channels are needed to collect information from user actions such as visits to websites and clicks on advertisements can be difficult.
Businesses can succeed despite these challenges by teaming up with experts that specialise in data analytics solutions allowing them to gain advice from people who have executed this solution multiple times and understand how to get the best out of your data and technology.
Data integration is a complicated field and it is recommended that you reach out to an expert who can consult you based on your current and future business needs.
Lastly, you must be equipped with the necessary knowledge and tools to provide insights and make sense of the real time data. Creating reports and dashboards that are best suited to your business can be difficult if you are unsure what key performance indicators are important for growth.
Do Good Things are experienced data and analytics consultants that can help you interpret your businesses data to drive sales and improve growth.
How Can Companies Benefit from Data and Analytics?
If you have not yet implemented data analytics, you are potentially missing out on key metrics to help you boost the growth of your company and take your business to the next level.
By using data driven decisions the element of risk can be mitigated and monitored by setting KPIs, and performance can be measured. Being able to measure the performance of your company year in year out is what will differentiate you from the rest of the competition.
The data your company is already generating is a gold mine waiting to be discovered.
Empower Your Team to Make Better Decisions
Do Good Things are data-driven solutionists. We have helped countless businesses like yours implement data analytics and get the best out of the data they have available.
From Marketing & Sales Analytic, Data Integrations to Reporting Solutions, we can provide reporting and analytics to empower your business with better data.
If you are looking for some actionable insights on the data that you have, get in touch with us today and let's chat.
*Global Partnership of Sustainable Development Data