Should you spend your advertising budget on Facebook or Google AdWords? What type of products are your customers going to be clamoring for when the holiday shopping season rolls around? You’ve been thinking about opening a second location – but where should it be?

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When you’re a business owner, you’re inundated with a constant flood of questions. Each question individually may not seem like such a big deal but taken all together, your answers will determine the health of your business. Making one wrong choice isn’t a catastrophe – if you choose the wrong product line, you have a sale, clear out the non-performing inventory, and move on – but in quantity, bad decisions lead to big problems.

You can use your data to make better decisions. The typical business owner has multiple sources of data about their customers’ identity, behavior, and preferences. This includes website data, social media data, data gathered by your POS system, and more. To use this data to make better decisions, you need a few things: a way to gather all of your data in one place so you can view it easily, the ability to filter relevant information from the noise, and an understanding of the type of information you need to make better business decisions.

For example, let’s say you want to know how to better allocate your advertising budget. Your data will reveal which channels are performing best for you, what your cost per acquisition is, and what type of customers are coming in through each channel. Given this, it’s time for you to make some choices: if you’re getting lots of leads from a low-cost channel, but very few of them convert, and fewer leads from a pricier alternative that converts more often, which one will you choose?

Once you’ve made your choices, your data still has a role to play.  Let’s say you decide to drop the low-cost channel and focus exclusively on the more expensive one; a month later, when you review the data, you may find that the growth experienced didn’t match, much less exceed, what you were experiencing previously. Data allows us to see the impact of our decisions in a timely fashion. If you don’t like what you’re seeing, you can adjust your approach – and then check the data again to see if you’re on the right track.

Being strategic isn’t easy, but it becomes easier when you have the right tools and information available to you. Making good use of your data begins with having the right data capture tools in place. If you’re not sure if you do, a data audit can help. Our team will review the systems you have in place, ensure everything is configured correctly, and help you derive actionable insights from what you learn. Sound good? Click here to get the process started.