It’s easy to become paralyzed by all of your possible decisions in business. After all, while one road might lead to success, another could have negative consequences for your business that you find difficult to undo. Therefore, making a decision based on something other than gut instinct could be a welcome prospect.
Using data can be exactly that, and far from being a rough guess at which direction to go in, this approach can use information directly pertaining to your business in order to give you a degree of confidence that might otherwise be lacking.
Customer Feedback
Your customers are going to have the best knowledge of what your genuine customer experience is like, and that means all of the pros and cons are there for you to access. The trick is finding the right way to get a hold of this information. Customer feedback can be gained in any number of ways, from physical forms to links shared on social media, but you might also find that you need to encourage people to share this information to begin with.
The answer to your conundrum might come in the form of a simple incentive. If you are able to, rewarding the completion of a customer feedback form with some sort of promotional offer might encourage people to participate – but it might also encourage those who have never sampled your brand before to give fraudulent answers as a means to an end, which is worth considering.
Your Own Business Data
Your own business is absolutely brimming with information from all of the interactions that people have had with it on the digital space – your social media pages, your marketing, your websites – all have a story to tell, but how to hear them? Well, you might find that the most effective method is to consider an ERP investment through companies like Cedar Bay that can give you a more comprehensive overview of the current state of your business. This information can help you to make the best possible decisions going forward, allowing you the confidence of knowing that such decisions came from statistical and quantitative origins.
General Stats
The information pertaining to your business isn’t the only information out there, and you might find that this more general information can be of enormous use to you. For example, combing through studies and finding which types of marketing might be more effective with your audiences can prevent you from wasting time down a particular path and can make better use of your time. Knowing that something isn’t worth your time is about as helpful as it gets when it comes to making informed decisions, and the groundwork might have already been laid by companies that have come before you.
You might know this better as market research, and this constitutes the secondary type of that. While primary might initially seem generally superior due to how it pertains to your business specifically, it’s worth taking into consideration the costs that come with it.