Businesses are living in an age where change is the only constant. The growing unpredictable minds of your target audience might not necessarily match your outlook. Fortunately, technological development comes with a real-time data that gives businesses deep insight into the ever-changing dynamics of consumer behaviour. As the digital world is inundated with data every second, harnessing data and using it as a strategic tool for competitive advantage, should be a priority for every organisations’ agenda.

What is Data-Driven Decision Making?

A data-driven approach is a phenomenon where organisations use data from internal records and various digital touchpoints like social media, websites, and apps to make informed business decisions. The historically extracted data is categorised and then analysed, the concluded patterns of which further enables decisions based on hard evidence. As the information is based on fact, the Data-driven culture reduces the risk factor in your business and simultaneously improves productivity.

How to make data-driven decisions?

Data-driven decision making needs an inherent understanding of an organisations’ requirements. Without it, the sheer amount of data available can be overwhelming – a systematic approach ensures organising and analysing the most relevant data sets .

The first step is identifying the different data sources that align with your problem. These sources can be sets of invoices, social media insights, website traffic, sales records, consumer reviews, performance metrics etc. For example, if you have a special measurable purpose in mind like calculating the success of a campaign, social media insights, ad metrics, google analytics, and online reviews would be the right data source.

After you have identified the right data source, you must filter out irrelevant data to enable  analysis of the objective. Filtering and organising the data narrows down your options ensuring the most accurate insights possible. Applications like Hootsuite, Hubspot, Insightly, Salesforce are great tools for organising the data. These tools organise data sets in a way that makes it easier to intemperate data from a glance. They also offer granular levels of insights making it easy to focus on something specific or have a high level overview.

How can Data-Driven Operations improve your business?

According to a Statista study 61% of the organisations in Australia are moving towards data driven decision-making. As technology took a step forward, heavy sets of data emerged at the same time when various digital applications were transforming business intelligence.

In its 2017 study, Capgemini commented that many existing companies were expected to face high-level competition from data-driven start-ups. Data is improving the efficiency of your business and opening up new doors of revenue stream, supply chain management, and expense management. After the pandemic of 2020, 55% of the companies across Australia and New Zealand are using data sources, dashboards and analytics to improve their business operations

Capture the Competitive Advantage

With the correct source and accurate analysis, data can help you understand consumer behaviour and get a better insight into customers’ perception of the brand. Organised data sets have a great capacity to show you whether your consumers like the campaign messages or after sale services; real-time dashboards allow you to be nimble and stay ahead from your competitors.

Make more insightful business decisions

Data sets give you a better understanding of past and present performance, based on which you can develop a clear strategy for your future goals. All your market research efforts are more streamlined where you can identify the potential threats to your industry and prepare for the forthcoming changes in the industry. An accurate analysis can tell you which product or service will work in which demographic and what kind of decisions you should make to impact your audience positively.

Remove the personal bias and reduce attrition

Data-driven decisions have a clear rationale behind them, it can mitigate personal bias and aid in reducing attrition rates of your consumer base, as you are taking decisions based on analysis of their behaviour and patterns

Higher Operational efficiency

Data gives you up-to-the-minute information which comes in quite handy reduce the waste expense and aid in cost savings. It helps in setting benchmarks towards specific goals and measurable results, where every employee is accountable. A higher operational efficiency can further pave the way to increase the scalable capacity of your business

How can SBA help you?

Whether you are working with Insightly or Hootsuite, Salesforce or HubSpot, SBA can support your data driven innovation journey. SBA have a high level of experience in Data Management, assisting with a variety of tasks ranging from campaign, social media and ad-word analysis to salesforce management or HubSpot management. At SBA, we work towards enhancing the data-driven culture so that your organisation’s marketing efforts get the reach it deserves.