5 ways business analytics can grow your business
Expanding a business is a big challenge. It takes dedication, uncanny foresight and savvy. If you built that business from the ground up, the stakes are even higher. Nevertheless, success is found at the intersection of great business sense and hard work. Successful business owners know the needs of their ideal customers. They know where they are located. And, they know how to get the word out there. This includes collecting and properly using the data that drives, informs and incites new action. This is where business analytics that offers self-service data discovery with data governance and a touch of predictive and planning comes in. Here are 5 ways business analytics can help you expand your business the data-driven way.
1. Expansion planning
Let’s say you’re ready to expand your business and open a branch, store, restaurant or office in a new location. And you have a ton of information about your growing customer base, equipment or other asset maintenance, employee payment and delivery or distribution scheduling. Did you know that you can use it all to build a detailed expansion plan based on what you know? With business analytics, you can find insights in visualizations and dashboards and then research them further with business intelligence and reports. Moreover, you can interact with the results and use the information to create your expansion plan.
2. Finding your audience
You’ll want to examine your current customer data to prepare. But, you should also research what people are saying about your company or brand and in what parts of the country or region. Business analytics offers social media analysis you can combine with internal customer data. Then, you take it and create a profile of your current and potential customers. As a result, you can find your ideal demographic. Comparing this demographic target with publicly available census data lets you see even more. You can identify where people are most likely to take advantage of your products or services. From there ,you can dive even more deeply into the data, researching your competition, for example. As a result, you can narrow down the area that offers the most in terms of expansion and customer potential.
3. Creating your business plan
All this real-time interaction with your data gives you a detailed map of what’s happening now, but you also need to know how well you’re performing first. With business analytics, you can use business performance solutions to find and forecast trends in sales, turnover and growth. Then you can take what you’ve discovered and develop an in-depth business plan for the next phase of your thriving franchise. You go from being a data scientist to a business planner. And before long, you have targeted the right location for your expansion.
4. Developing your marketing campaign
With what you’ve learned about your audience and local competitors with business analytics, you can send the right message to the audience most eager to try your restaurant as part of a perfect marketing campaign. Moreover, you can narrow down branding details, messaging tone and consumer preferences, like the right offers that will differentiate you from the other businesses in the area. You gain the competitive edge by making sure you offer something new to your customers and prospects. Business analytics enables you to use your data to make insight-driven, targeted marketing and business development decisions so you can make decisions that can grow your business with confidence.
5. Use predictive insights to take action
Don’t miss opportunities to make great plans. With predictive insights provided by business analytics, you can optimize your expansion and set yourself apart from the crowd. Business analytics enables you to study the factors that are influencing outcomes, while also providing the power of decision optimization so you can be assured that you’re on the right track. You can take challenges in stride, solve them quickly, and learn how to improve performance so your expansion is a success and you can explore the possibility of future expansion.
SOURCE: Forsyth Alexander
