Use Data to Take the Guesswork Out of Running a Business

There’s no room for assumptions when running a business. But luckily, technology offers plenty of opportunities for businesses to find almost any kind of data they might be able to use.

Data can be used to develop products, come up with marketing campaigns, track the success of various initiatives, and basically anything else you can think of.

Not all business owners necessarily take advantage of all these different types of data. But they should, according to Sujan Patel. He explained in a recent Forbes article why data can make such a big difference to businesses developing and marketing their products.

The example he cited was a meal delivery company called Munchery. The entrepreneur behind Munchery, Conrad Chu, was having trouble figuring out why the company’s premium level meals weren’t selling in a new market. So he turned to his data. Patel wrote:

“The data revealed several remarkable trends, including identifying vastly different tastes when comparing Seattle based customers to those in San Francisco. Without the initiative to undertake this kind of exploration – as well as the tools needed to make such data analysis a possibility – Chu’s enterprise would be stuck wondering why a previously successful approach wasn’t working in a new market.”

There are so many different tools for collecting data when running a business, from Google Analytics to tools like Import.io, which can gather data from other sites. So that means that your company doesn’t really have an excuse to not collect all of the data that it possibly can.

With so many tools and so much different information, actually making sense of it all could prove to be the tricky part. But there are data professionals and plenty of online resources that can help you actually draw conclusions from your data.

If you’re able to collect data about your customers and their habits and actually use it to make improvements in your business, that takes away a lot of the guesswork. So your previous assumptions about what’s likely to work for your business will turn into educated actions. And that change is likely to give you a much bigger chance at success.

Data on Screen Photo via Shutterstock

This article, "Use Data to Take the Guesswork Out of Running a Business" was first published on Small Business Trends