How to Make Smarter Decisions to Fuel Business Growth

We’ve all heard the term Big Data, right? Everyone’s running their business by adapting data as its crucial part.

Data is everywhere. From videos you watch, content you read, and products you buy. As Chris Lynch says:

Big data is at the foundation of all of the megatrends that are happening today, from social to mobile to the cloud to gaming.

With the rise of data, organizations are finding ways to utilize it to drive business decisions. No matter what type, size, or sector, every company is making decisions by adding utmost importance to data.

Be it human resources, sales, or customer service, companies are putting lots of effort into data to drive sales, build relationships, and improve their products.

The good news is that you can even use data to make smart decisions and fuel business growth.

In this article, we’ll share all the information related to data-driven decision-making along with five essential steps that you can use to make smarter decisions.

What is data-driven decision-making?

Data-driven decision-making is a systematic process that collects relevant data by analyzing facts, patterns from insights, and deploying them to create several strategies and activities that benefit the business in various areas.

In simple words, data-driven decision-making is putting efforts and working towards a goal by collecting, analyzing, and mining data to make future decisions.

In the earlier times, several marketers worked on intuition which led them to waste time and budget. This is where data decision-making came in. In today’s time, robust business intelligence tools and data science made decision-making even simpler.

Why data-driven decision-making is essential for business?

Data plays a vital role in bringing continuous growth to businesses. It helps companies develop business opportunities, accumulate higher revenue, analyze future trends, and create actionable insights.

Data-driven decisions can make or break your company. The primary reason behind this is constant changes in the digital world. With this ever-changing landscape, it’s your primary duty to leverage data and make uniform business decisions to fuel growth in 2021.

Companies that adopt data-driven decision-making treat information as valuable assets compared to companies with arguable approaches.

According to Bi-survey.com

60% “best-in-class” companies base their decisions more on information while “laggard” companies base a worryingly high 70% of their decisions on gut feel

Data-driven decision-making is a significant way to obtain a competitive advantage, collect profits, and reduce expenses.

How to use data to drive smarter business decisions?

Before stepping into making business decisions, you must make a well-detailed plan of action that includes finding data and interpreting it to make correct business decisions.

Here are five effective step-by-step procedures that will help you start data-driven business decisions.

Set your goals and organize it

The first step to make your business data-driven is to set meaningful goals and make conscious decisions.

It’s essential to think about your business goals at the core. When you’re planning and making effective decisions, you must initiate with the essential goal.

For example: Let’s say you’re looking for people from the US to subscribe to your blogs. In this case, more people subscribing to your blogs is the utmost priority. While researching, you find that 65% of subscriptions come from France, but less than 5% come from the US. Thus, the primary goal will be to increase the number of subscriptions in the US.

Once you’ve planned and decided the major things, all you need is relevant data to proceed further.

Identify and collect essential data

Once you’ve set goals, the next step is to identify and collect the correct, essential data. We all know it takes time to obtain relevant data for your business.
Spending hours on data that doesn’t impact the final decision will be a waste of time. Collect only relevant data that aligns with your business goals.

There are several sources that will help you to find a goldmine of data. These are:

Customer Relationship Management Software (CRM)
Feedback from customers
Social media and website analytics
CSV or Excel files
Business intelligence platforms
Social listening tools

Looking back at our subscribing example, you can ask your previous subscribers why they choose to subscribe to your product over the competitor’s product.

Collecting all relevant data from your subscribers will help you create a compelling message to send to US subscribers.

Analyze data and identify patterns or trends

Visualize your data and strategize

Once you’ve analyzed your data with the help of charts, bars, or graphs, the next step is to visualize your data. Visualizing data is key in data-driven decision-making as it adds life to your efforts on findings.

You can use a stacked bar chart for comparative analysis or a map for data visualization to gain better insights.

With this, you’ll be able to know the major areas of a country from which you’re getting the major tickets. These tickets will help you to find trends that help resolve long wait times.

With relevant analytical reports, you’ll have the opportunity to create a correct and stronger data plan of placation to transform your decision into practice. It’ll also help promote your collaboration plan and, hence, sharing your data with external businesses will be vital to fuel your business growth.

Measure success and progress

The process of making a business data-driven doesn’t stop at the conclusion point; there’s more to go.

By repeating the above-given steps and following them, you’ll be able to use correct data and create better Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or set benchmarks for an existing business.

How locobuzz can help with Data-Driven decision making?

In order to make your business data driven, you need to gather, store and manage your data in a correct and secure way. You can easily do this with the help of Locobuzz CRM Software.

With the help of it’s marketing and research insights, you will be able to make data-driven decisions faster rather than analyzing user-data in real time. It will even help you to generate leads, and deliver actionable insights by identifying important data sets.

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Final thoughts

While several businesses are making steady progress towards digital transformation, companies need to make data their primary companion.

It’s because data is a critical enterprise asset that every organization should embrace. After all, hard facts won’t be of much value when it comes to the decision-making process.

Getting started with data-driven decision-making will initially be challenging, but with the help of Locobuzz it’ll prove to be the best way to fuel your business growth