When you’re running a business as a CEO or founder, or even simply managing a team that provides a vital function within the greater whole, the main skill you are exercising is decision making. Every day brings with it fresh challenges, and you need the clarity to identify what the heart of each issue is, and how you can spend the resources available to you in the form of budget, skills and manpower to get the best out of the situation. It might be an unexpected problem, like the loss of a client, or simply the normal rigours of life in business: you require a result, you have your team available, a certain amount of money to spend and the equipment you have on hand. How do you deploy those resources to get not just the minimum results you need but to drive your business forward and leave it in a stronger position?
What you need is data. Gathering data on your business, on the market, on your customers allows you to model the results of any action and make increasingly reliable predictions. Let’s take a look at the kind of data you can gather and the good it can do for you!
Customers
What your customers think of you and how they behave is one of the most important things you can research. A brand tracker survey shows you how consumers rank you against your competitors, and over time how the decisions you take affect your brand, strengthening it and weakening it, allowing you to make better choices and avoid the bad ones!
You can also study your customers behaviour. Tracking their journey through your website, you can see whether they’re able to find the information they need and what proportion of visits end in a purchase. You can identify the areas where that journey is interrupted and streamline them to bring your customers back on track.
Your Own Business
Measuring your own business’ performance is vital. If you’re not keeping track of your own achievements, or lack thereof, you’re running the risk of ploughing into trouble without realising it.
You need to set markers for success and failure and measure your progress in relation to them as a business – are you making enough money, do you have enough clients, are you growing fast enough? Tracking this data means identifying what works and doubling down on it, as well as spotting trouble before it becomes a disaster and steering away from it.