By now you’ve probably heard about the importance of collecting big data. Any business willing to expand and succeed in the industry needs to have this information in-hand. But in spite of knowing that you need to collect that information, understand it might not be so simple. It requires knowledge and a team member who can translate the data into coherent reports.
Part of any data scientist daily work, besides data cleansing and munging, is to translate it into something that can be used by any other team member within the business such as systems engineers, financial teams, PR, HR, marketing team and SEO to take decisions and implement the appropriate changes.
Thus, at TravelgateX we’ve created a quick list of tips to help small and big brands who wish to learn more about data science and analysis.
Work on communication and be clear
Communication may be one of the most overlooked aspects of the company. A team without the necessary information doesn’t have a clear path to where the company is heading. It’s important to communicate to each department the main goals and KPIs as well as the strategy that should be taken. But companies need a custom-tailored strategy instead of having a pre-made strategy.
Minor choices in data measurement and analysis can dramatically impact our identities, economies, and lives.
The first thing an analyst should be asking himself is, what data is relevant for the business, and how clear can this data be on reports? It might sound obvious at first, but dominating and presenting clear reports is just not about doing your job, it’s almost like an art. Some of the best experts in the industry are able to collect thousands of zettabytes from different places and resume it to a single headline. That’s the real challenge.
How should you create a measurement strategy?
The data collected in these reports can be used to find your desired new customers through segmentation and to target your market. But before implementing any strategy on a large scale, it’s best to test out multiple approaches and discuss what are the main goals for your brand.
Understanding Big Data is a very important piece of creating a marketing strategy in today’s digital world
In order to build the right strategy, you need to go through a simple process. Organize a meeting and gather the rest of the managers to review some of the key points:
1) Create a column with a list that includes the KPIs, goals, and desires of the business. Is there any data that you don’t have now and that would make you stronger or more productive?
2) Then create a second column with the list of metrics that you wish to monitor and the metrics you’re currently tracking. Then by comparing the two columns see if there is any missing or if there is any that isn’t relevant.
3) Review and choose the tools you have at hand in your business in order to gather that data.
4) Communicate these KPI’s and goals to the rest of the team in order for them to understand what is important for the brand.
Here is a quick video on how big data works for companies
What should you be measuring?
What’s important to your business may not be exactly the same as what’s important to another one. Every brand tracks different elements depending on their goals and products. What they do have in common is, the need for feedback and guidance for future decisions. But where is that information coming from and exactly what should you be measuring?
The handiest and easy to read data we have are probably those coming from real-time analytics. From updated results of customer events, such as page views, website navigation, shopping cart use, or any other kind of online or digital activity, the real-time report lets you see what is happening live on your website.
Within these reports, we can highlight one in particular that is especially important, which is user’s behaviour. This data not only allows you to understand how customers are using your website but also the changes in their preferences, what products they buy and what is changing on their online behaviour.
Customer experience
Apart from analyzing user’s behavior, you need to add the customer experience report to your list. AT&T affirmed that: ‘there is nothing more important than the relationship between your brand and the customer.’
It’s essential to detect possible problems and barriers that customers might cross when navigating through the website. By detecting those issues early will allow your team to implement the right solutions in order to improve the user experience.
“Figuring out which data to track when implementing a customer experience survey is the most important part of the data collection”
But besides all the reasons why you should be using big data for improving user experience, the most important might be to understand what’s working and what’s not. You might be selling the best product in the industry and have new great ideas, but if the UX is failing, the whole strategy will be failing.
Identify Opportunities for Innovation & Expansion
Any entrepreneur willing to grow can be visionary and see brilliant opportunities. But despite that desire, will those opportunities be lucrative? What you think might be a good idea, can quickly become a misstep. You need to analyse whether that step will be profitable and cost-effective in the long term. So, how do you know if it will be?
Before determining whether to move forward with a business growth opportunity, you should take a look at big data. Having a perspective on what is working for the rest of your markets and how they have evolved until now is a great start.
Reports such as PoS, CRM, click streams, social media, and campaigns, among others, provides many valuable insights and you are able to see demographic & geographic penetration, customer behavior, and many other things. Having this in-hand will help you take the right decisions and control the overall success of your brand expansion.
Insights-X: Choosing the right analytics solution
When choosing an analytics solution, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with endless tools. For instance, you may decide to incorporate a whole team to carry out these reports and analysis, but don’t forget to take into account the costs and add them to your budget.
There are many free tools that you can use to manage big data but unfortunately, none will give you all the information in a single report. Chances are you’ll have to collect different data from various sources making the whole process tedious and not very efficient.
Insights-X, the data tool that allows you to optimize travel business
Think about the importance of big data in your strategy and reserve part of your budget to build a good team. But if having a team is not viable, you can always hire an external consultant to send you those reports and help you understand them, otherwise, start looking for a powerful and complete solution that will do the work for you.
At TravelgateX we know how important it is to have everything in a single report to avoid confusion. Not all entrepreneurs have the time, expertise or budget to hire a full team, therefore, having a tool such as Insights-X allows small and large businesses to see and make decisions about future integrations, global expansion, transaction routing, and omnichannel commerce in order to optimize the customer experience at every touch point.
Summary
Clearly, analytics and big data are much like many other disciplines. It requires expertise and transparency to avoid making the wrong decisions. Having all of this information about your customers and how they behave on your website, can help dramatically on sales and can help you generate more traffic, but only if you are willing to be led by the data.
Brands holding on to past strategies and products will not find much success even taking by having these reports. Their resistance to change won’t let them see where customers are and where they are going. Embrace data and follow where it leads you so you can keep evolving and growing in your niche.
If you need more information regarding our tools, feel free to contact us by email or give us a call to request a demo.