I am super excited today as I will begin to shove through some data, data collated in bits over the last 5 months. It is amazing the number of insights anyone can mine from a rich collection of relevant data, and you can then make lots of informed decisions from such data.
Data Analytics is now indeed a key weapon everyone should have inside their arsenal and I think every organisation should really start paying more attention to data.
Let me give you an example scenario.
Retailers should start logging data about their customers and stock:
- Who are their customers? (Age, Interests, Purchasing power etc)
- When is the store most trafficked by people?
- Which store layout/arrangements lead to most sales?
Data analytics can get you the answers to these questions and you will be on your way to making more profit.
How?
If you know your customers, their purchasing power and their interests, you can delight them in so many ways by consistently been able to predict what next to offer them.
Websites are incomplete unless appropriate web analytics tracking tools are installed on it. At the very basic, Google Analytics is free to use and the insights you will get from the tool is good enough for your basic business needs.
With analytics, you will find out who is browsing your website, where they come from and which marketing activity resulted in the visit. The days of blind guess work are over.
The challenge many face is the hurdle of collating the data. Data collation is quite stressful, and as such there is a market in Nigeria for real data collation and crunching startups. The people peddling phone number lists around have gotten it wrong, such lists are probably useful to only people with more money than brains which explains why politicians are their major targets. But the everyday businesses also need targeted lists that only real data collation can handle, and anyone that can solve this problem is onto something big. I tried my hands at that with a spam-free city based event discovery platform and more recently, I am trying to boot up a business analytics service that will help business collate and process their data meaningfully.
So, little drops of data collected bit by bit can truly improve your business and help you make better decisions. It works all the time.
