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How to Drive Business Growth With Analytics

Jared Atchison
Jared Atchison
business.com Member
Nov 04, 2019

One of the most powerful tools in a business's arsenal is analytics. In this article, you'll find a breakdown of the different ways analytics can help your business grow.

There's a wealth of information available to any business that's ready to embrace it. Data is probably the most important resource a business can possess. With data, you can drive change with positive outcomes and support your business's growth.

It's important for every business decision to be grounded in solid data. Data analytics can provide you with key insights that help you make the best choices to serve your business and customers.

Data analytics tell you about the health of your business. You'll have a clear idea of whether you're on the road to achieving your business goals, what's happening in your business, and what you should do to make it thrive. 

It's easier than ever to get pertinent data that affects your business. There are tools that you can easily embed on your website. You can automate data collection and analysis, and get sophisticated reports on your own dashboard. 

For e-commerce businesses, analytics can be the difference between success and failure. Without the ability to measure user behavior and other activities, it's not possible to make money online. You can use analytics to measure and support just about any business activity. 

Let's uncover the different ways data analytics can help your business grow. 

1. It helps you set realistic goals.

Setting goals for your business will involve guesswork without the right information. You don't want your business goals to be a moving target, shifting from time to time. This is where analytics comes into play. 

With analytics, you'll be able to assemble data from historic trends and previous activities. You'll have a clear idea of what your goals should and can be right from the start. This ensures that you don't mis opportunities to help your business grow. It also makes it very clear when certain goals aren't possible. Such data analysis will also show you both weaknesses and strengths that you can improve on to grow your business. 

2. It supports decision-making. 

A decision-maker's intuition and experience are valuable, but decisions that affect a business ought to rely on data. You can't make good decisions about inventory management, pricing strategies and other business factors without data.  Even when it comes to hiring people, actionable data can help you assess how many people to hire and how best to deploy them. 

Businesses that use data are three times as likely to report that their decision-making has improved. By incorporating data analytics into your decisions, you'll reduce risks. You'll also feel more confident that you're improving your efficiency and business profits. 

3. It helps you find your ideal demographic.

There are many ways to identify your ideal demographic with analytics. Data from your existing customer base and social media are valuable sources of information. You can study your competitors' audience as well. There's also publicly available data that can be helpful. By using analytics to study your audience, you'll get rich and insightful information.

There are many tools that make it easy to gather data about your audience. You can add Google Analytics to your website. Facebook and other social media platforms also offer solutions for businesses. You can also add analytics plugins to your site to understand user behavior. You'll know how people interact with your products and the type of content that creates the most engagement. 

Once you've determined your ideal demographic, you can provide tailored content and solutions. In this way, leveraging analytics can lead to more conversions.

4. You can segment your audience.

You can divide your audience into distinct groups with analytics. This provides great value for your business, helping you avoid forcing irrelevant content on your audience. 

You'll be able to create better products and make your communications more personalized. Tools like Google Analytics will help you learn more about your audience. You can use it to analyze search queries that lead to your site. This helps uncover your users' intent. Once you know what your audience is looking for, you'll be in a better position to meet those needs. 

5. It helps you create mass personalization.

When you've segmented your audience with the help of analytics tools, you can create mass personalization. You can set up tools to automatically and effectively personalize email marketing content. You can automate and personalize ad content to target large groups of people and create personalization at the same time. This boosts your business's reach and impact, driving up conversions.

Personalization is powerful – 74% of marketers agree that targeted personalization drives up customer engagement. By using data to drive your marketing efforts, you can set up relevant experiences across your customer's purchase journey. 

6. You can increase your revenue and lower your costs.

Analytics plays a major role in decreasing business costs and increasing revenue. It's vital to ensure that you are using important resources as effectively as possible. One study shows that companies that adopt data-driven marketing strategies can increase revenue by 20% and reduce costs by 30%.

Analytics is useful to monitor e-commerce activities, ad campaigns and multifunnel channels. It allows you to measure their performance and effectiveness, making it easy to see what works and what doesn't. You can stop campaigns that aren't bringing in results, figure out which keywords are driving traffic, and put resources into better keywords and campaigns. 

7. You can boost your memberships.

You can leverage data analytics to boost membership rates on your site. Analytics provides insights that can help you optimize your membership campaigns. You can pinpoint what's working and put more resources there. 

Analytics helps websites built on membership platforms by telling them more about their members. Online educational sites, hobby platforms, communities, and forums all need data to manage and maintain their websites. 

You can use membership site analytics to get a deeper understanding of a community site. It's easy to measure historic growth and current trends. You can then project your site's membership growth more accurately instead of guessing. You'll get rich data on membership trends, numbers and behaviors. This tells you what content gets the most traffic and why membership growth rates stall. 

8. It helps you monitor social media. 

Analytics tools can also provide in-depth information on what people are saying about your brand online. You can track your brand mentions and hashtags on social media. Social media websites provide analytics to measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns on their platforms. You'll get data on where your audience is from and what their interests are. These platforms also let you know what devices your audience is using and provide important demographic information. You can use this information to optimize your website and manage content. 

If your brand is trending online, you can gather and analyze information that will help you leverage this in the future. With billions of people active on social media, analytics can help you reach out to the right audience. This will help you boost traffic and drive conversions to help your business grow. 

You can embrace analytics to drive business growth.

Embracing data throughout your organization has clear benefits. You create actionable insights by adding analytics tools to your websites and business processes. You can track different activities and create measurements that produce actionable data. 

The saying "what isn't measured can't be managed" is truer than ever these days. Without analytics in place, you'll be feeling around in the dark. Data and analytics help you understand what works for your business and what doesn't. 

Make analytics a strong part of your business by implementing it at every stage. You can do this by getting the right tools and hiring qualified people. Encourage your entire organization to make decisions based on data as well. When you introduce analytics to your organization at every level, you'll pave the way to business growth. 

Image Credit: NicoElNino / Getty Images
Jared Atchison
Jared Atchison
business.com Member
Co-Founder of WPForms, one of the largest WordPress contact form plugins in the market. I have been programming for over a decade and enjoy creating plugins that help people create powerful web designs without touching code.