Growing your business is exciting, but it can also be overwhelming. Where do you start? What do you focus on? Growth requires trying new things, learning from failures, and modifying your strategy. But, you don’t have to make these decisions in the dark. Data analytics can help you grow your business smarter.
Define Your Goals
Business growth can be achieved in many different ways. It might look like adding 30 new clients or 4 new products to your line up. Perhaps, you want to increase sales by 20% for a particular service. You might want to expand into a new market. Determine what growing your business will look like this year.
If you don’t take the time to define what success looks like, you’ll be working aimlessly or striving towards a moving target. Create clear and specific goals you want to achieve.
Identify the Best Customers to Pursue
After establishing your company’s goals, make a plan for how you will reach them. What products and services should you focus on? Which customers and prospects should you pursue in order to reach your goals?
The best way to figure this out is to model your customers. A customer model will show you who your customers are, where they are coming from, and can even show you which customers are buying specific products. Data modeling scores and ranks each customer, so you know which ones are ideal for your product or services as well as the most profitable.
Knowing what your best customers look like means you can identify look-a-like prospects. You don’t have to blindly market to an audience. You can select the best candidates and focus your efforts on them, maximizing your ROI.
Use Strategic Marketing
How you spend your marketing budget matters. You can have beautiful, eye-catching creative and get zero responses because you targeted the wrong people. Or you can target your best customers with an offer that’s irrelevant to them or creative that doesn’t resonate with them.
Data analytics provides an in-depth view of who your target audience is and how best to reach them. Use this knowledge to make strategic marketing decisions. Your customer analytics can inform how you design your creative, what you offer, and even where you advertise.
Track Responses
Good goals are measurable. In order to know how you are doing, create a system for capturing responses. Keep track of who interacted with your marketing such as clicked on your URL, PURL, ad, or scanned the QR code. At transaction points whether online or in-person, try to capture customer information. This data can be used to run a response analysis that will identify which prospects on your marketing list made a purchase.
Learn and Adjust
When you have your response analysis information in hand, see how it compares to your original model. What can you learn about your customers? Take your findings, refine the customer model, and adjust your marketing strategy. Part of growing your business will require you to test and try new things out. You can grow smarter by using the information and experience you acquire to keep honing in on the best customers and offers for your business.
Are you ready to grow your business smarter? Decide what kind of growth you want to go after, identify the best customers and prospects to help you get there, track your progress, and adapt your strategy as needed.
If you want to know more about your customers or need help creating your growth strategy for this year, let’s connect. Our team will be happy to help you start the year off strong.