Your company’s first year in business is filled with valuable experiences and challenges. It’s also a great time to begin deriving insights from the data your business collects to drive future growth and improvements. Here are four things you can learn from your data during your first year in the business world.
How to Price Your Products
One of the easiest insights to derive from your data is how customers see your pricing. If your products virtually never sell at full price but do well once a sale begins, it’s a good sign that your prices are a bit too high. Conversely, constant sales at full price may be an indication that you could optimize your earnings by increasing your prices. Look back over your sales records, and you’ll likely see patterns that can help you fine-tune your pricing for optimal revenues.
The Path Customers Take Toward Buying
In online sales, it’s extremely important to understand the route customers take from discovering your business to making a purchase. With integrated analytics software like the one produced by Grow.com and other similar sites, you can combine insights from multiple platforms and find out which ones were most effective at converting customers. From there, you can use these insights to improve your future marketing efforts.
How Engaged Your Customers Are
Social media sites like Facebook and Instagram are enormously helpful for measuring customer engagement. When you post on these sites, customers have the option to interact with your brand. If you’re seeing very low engagement rates, it’s a clear signal that you need to improve your social media content to make it more interesting to your audience. If certain posts or pieces of content have unusually high engagement rates relative to the rest, you can try to create more like them to replicate that success.
Your Customer Demographics
Finally, your data can reveal important insights about who your customers are. Age, sex, income levels and other demographic data are extremely useful in targeting ad campaigns and creating marketing materials that will speak to your core customer base. Getting to know your customer is a long process, but the data from your first year in business should be able to give you at least a few rough insights into who’s most likely to buy your products.
As your business continues to grow, you’ll need to keep drawing more and better insights from the data you collect. After one year, you should have enough data to draw meaningful conclusions and make data-driven decisions going forward.
