Gaining New Ground: How We Can Analyze Our Data Better

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StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures (OPM) Article |Analyze Data Better|Gaining New Ground: How We Can Analyze Our Data BetterWhen it comes to boosting our business profile, a lot of people make the mistake of getting the right tools and thinking this is enough. Whenever we implement a process, the critical aspect of the tools is about ensuring we analyze the information that comes back to us. Analyzing your data is invaluable to companies of all shapes and sizes, and this is why you need to learn how to analyze your data better. Let’s show you some of the key steps you should take to analyze your data far more sufficiently.

Integrating the Right Tools

There are so many tools your business should have in place to understand how to work better. SEO companies like Search Miners will ensure that you gain a greater understanding of the right keywords, and what is engaging your customers more. The great thing about these types of tools is that they can be integrated easily. There are a variety of plugins that you can use to make the most of your SEO practices.

Evaluate the Relevance of Your Data

Collecting data through a variety of channels, for example, website tracking, lead generation forms, and social media networks will all give you a clearer picture of how your business engages with consumer data. You need to learn how valuable this data is. Analyzing the accuracy of information is critical before you spend effort analyzing it. If the information does not provide insight, you have to reconsider how best you gather these pertinent facts.


Drawing Better Conclusions

When we look at analyzing our data, it is vital that we gain actionable insights, but we must interpret these results appropriately to draw up the best plan of action. Information provided by customers through data visualization can help you to represent the information in a way that everybody can understand. This is especially true if you are dealing with figures. The reality is that in your marketing team, you may very well have people who are uncomfortable with numbers. This is why it’s critical for us to display the information in a way that makes it easier for people to interpret. You can use tools like Google Charts to turn information into graphs, which will make it easily understandable and engage your team on every level.

Stimulating Action

Finally, the key part to analyzing your business data better is to ensure that you are providing actionable steps to turn it into viable solutions. It’s not just about the right tools, but having a greater understanding of the end goal. Whatever the information is, whether you are trying to promote your business better, or you are looking to increase your security, you should consider the best ways to transform the knowledge you’ve received into practices that create greater insight into your business.

Whether you are looking to gain greater insight into your digital marketing practices or you are looking to gain new ground, the information we all have at our fingertips is an integral part of how we can be better at the work we do.

5 Essential Measures Of Charting Business Success

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StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures Article |Charting Business Success|5 Essential Measures Of Charting Business SuccessWhen you think about it, ‘success’ is often a broad term, and it applies to many different desirable outcomes. For instance, a post-injury patient overcoming the long journey of learning to walk again, alongside their physiotherapist, will no doubt feel the same kind of personal success that a major athlete feels when coming in first – both have had to put in work, aim for goals, and battle adversity, even if the outcomes seem very different on the surface; success abounds with each.

The same principles could apply for business. A small company that couldn’t hope to compete with a multi-national entity may be adored within its community and have generations of patrons select them first, ultimately guaranteeing a small market to serve for some time, and won via fantastic goodwill efforts.

That said, while thinking of your success in relative terms is a smart place to start, it’s also important to know what format by which to present real, tangible metrics you can use to plan for the future. Let’s consider how to achieve that, below:

The Essential Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

It’s important to recognize that the key metrics for growth can be defined in more than one way. This list of customer success KPIs is a fantastic place to start. They allow you to understand where your risks and opportunities are when it comes to net revenue retention and driving business growth. One recommendation provided will show you how to calculate net revenue retention (NRR) to see the growth of revenue even without onboarding new customers.

In addition, seeing the churn rate of customers who may come and go can help you determine what your actual growth figures are and how they trend. In addition to this, managing your relationships, especially with long-term customers, is an essential measure to focus on, as anyone can generate new clients, but if they stick around, that suggests you’re doing something correctly.

Sales Growth & Retaining Customers After Promotions

Retaining customers after a promotion is a healthy means of showing if your product or service is delivering its value, or is perceived as valuable, once the real charges are applied. Anyone can sign up to a month free trial, but if a customer is happy to retain your service after signing on during that period, then odds are you’ve kept them for the time being.

It can be helpful to also push surveys out to these accounts for an incentive, perhaps offering 5% discount on their next purchase for completing a five-minute survey. Here you can determine why they stayed, if they would in the future, and what their main decision was to keep their subscription ticking over. You may reformat this depending on the general intent of your business, but it’s not hard to see how this perspective makes a difference.


Customer/Client Favorability

It’s healthy to consider the customer and client favorability that you grow over time. Note that this means more than just enhancing your relationship and remaining on good terms, but analyzing just how long term clients or even recently onboarded clients regard your service.

Comment cards, feedback, and analyzing their behavior using your services (are they receptive to upselling, do they preorder your newest items, what packages do they go for?) can make a huge difference.

In addition, you may be able to track this feedback through online customer reviews, seeing the discourse regarding your company on social media platforms like Twitter, and seeing what aggregate websites like TrustPilot have to say about your particular brand. This might not be a particular numerical measurement, but it does give you an insight into the wider cultural conversation about your brand, and how it’s viewed from various levels of your customer base.

Market Share

Analyzing your share of the market by calculating your total sales and dividing them by the reported sales of your industry can be a good idea. It will help you understand what share of the market your business is cornering, or at least give you an approximate idea.

Of course, you can adjust this depending on your niche, your specific location and the markets you serve. Note that you probably will occupy only a small corner of the market, and that’s okay, even this can serve businesses competently for years upon years going forward.

Market share can give you a somewhat decent understanding of how you might be fairing compared to your competitors. In some ways, this may be obvious, but again, one more tool in the arsenal to determine your position is never a bad thing, and should never be considered as such.

Staff Feedback & Satisfaction

It’s healthy to consider the staff feedback and satisfaction that you gain over time. Sure, no business will run solely that its staff feel happy and comfortable in their roles, as this is not enough to support their salaries.

That said, it’s an essential measure of if your internal management structure has been working effectively or not, and if that’s backed up with meeting realistic targets and solid productivity metrics, then odds are you’re doing something right.

A staff survey, listening diligently to the reports of your managers, and making sure staff are permitted to review working for you online in any way they wish will make a big difference. Sure, staff being happy and feeling capable in their roles is a good thing no matter what. But it will also lead to benefits such as them going the extra mile, staying at your company and lowering staff turnover (which is good if you’ve invested money in training them), and even promoting working for your brand to people they know.

In some cases, companies that are awarded ‘best employer’ status in your area have candidates lining outside of the gate for a chance to work for you. A great number of promising staff members hoping to apply the best years of their innovative thinking and hard work is never a bad thing for your brand.

With this advice, we hope you can understand some of the most essential measures of charting business success. With a little luck and a willingness to keep on top of these metrics, you may feel more secure in your position than ever.

How to Protect Your Company’s Data

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StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures Article |Protect your company's data|How to Protect Your Company's DataWhen you’re running a business your data is one of the most important things that you possess. If your data is compromised it can allow cybercriminals to get access to sensitive information that can cripple your business.

Sometimes businesses recover in a few weeks but the amount of revenue that is lost can be devastating and it can take several months or even years for the business to recover. Some businesses never recover at all and they completely go under because of a security breach, here are some tips for protecting your business.

Do Regular Audits

Conducting a regular cyber security audit is one way to protect your data. When you do regular audits you will identify the strengths and weaknesses as well as the gaps in your security and you can take measures to swiftly correct them before your data is reached.

Have a Plan

The next thing you need to do is to have a plan of how you are going to deal with security breaches. Your audit will tell you about your vulnerabilities and you can then come up with a step-by-step plan for dealing with them.

The best thing you can do for your business is to have a cyber security protocol in place. This way those on your team who are in charge of IT will know exactly which steps to take if data has been compromised.

Consider outsourcing your IT services to AWS Professional Services to get managed IT services to protect your data.


Do Regular Backups

Backing up your data is one of the easiest ways to protect your business. You can do this daily in the clouds. You can even do it every few hours if that makes you feel more secure.

This way if your data is hacked and stolen you can access it to get your business up and running sooner rather than later.

Educate Your Employees

Cybercrime can take many different forms and it is up to you to educate your employees about this. Many times companies have data breaches simply because employees were ignorant about the different types of cybersecurity and data breaches that are possible.

For example, one of the most popular cyber crimes is phishing emails. These emails look as if they are coming from legitimate persons in an organization. However, on closer inspection, they contain links to malware and ransomware or phishing websites that mimic your company’s website.

All this is done to capture information and target your financial and other sensitive information.

Stay Safe

Securing your business data should always be a priority. Breaches in security can affect your business significantly.

The best way to avoid this is to ensure that you have a plan in place that addresses cybersecurity. You should always be on the lookout for suspicious activity that signals something is not right.

Once you identify these things you can then take action to secure your business as quickly as possible.

4 Characteristics of a Modern Data Management Strategy

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StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures Article |Data Management|4 Characteristics of a Modern Data Management StrategyClean, comprehensive data is one of the most, if not the most, useful assets at an organization’s disposal. Data analytics is a major driving force behind business leaders’ efforts to streamline operations, connect with new clients, and gain an advantage over competitors. Unfortunately, for many organizations, efforts to devise and execute strategic initiatives tend to be hampered by the need to spend significant amounts of time and financial resources toward compliance with regulatory mandates.

In the world of business today, regulatory standards and requirements change at dizzying speeds, shifting the needs and responses of financial institutions in turn. Hence, it’s more necessary than ever for organizational decision-making to be proactive, fast, and above all data-driven. If an organization’s workforce and resources are spread thin just attending to daily upkeep and scrambling to meet complex regulatory demands, it will have little time and energy left to focus on profitability.

Many digital solutions available today promise a stable data foundation that will allow companies to handle their information more accurately and efficiently. Employing such solutions is a key step for organizations to develop an up-to-date approach to data management. Some essential qualities a modern data management strategy must have include the following:

Well-Integrated and Unified

One of the greatest challenges organizations face when it comes to data management has to do with depending on siloed legacy systems that make it difficult to collect and reconcile data across multiple sources. Such essential areas as risk, compliance, treasury, and finance often make use of disparate databases and reporting tools. This fragmented approach can, in turn, hinder necessary interdepartmental communication and make it difficult to gain an enterprise-wide perspective.

Above all else, a modern data management strategy seeks to create a single, unified source of truth that is able to pull essential data from multiple sources. This ensures that useful information can be aggregated and accessed across all units within the enterprise. The right digital solutions will be able to perform these unifying functions with great efficiency and accuracy, reducing operational costs and eliminating the risk of redundancies and inconsistencies in your data.

Automation saves valuable time that would have been spent on data collection and reconciliation, allowing you to channel it toward more productive analytical efforts. With a clean, consolidated source of information at your fingertips, your organization will be well-equipped to mine deeper, more substantial business insights at a faster pace than before.

Agile and Adaptable

Demands from regulators, customers, and the market itself can shift radically by the day, if not by the hour. More often than not, organizations are then judged by how quickly and creatively they are able to respond. Hence, it’s imperative for any company to find ways to boost its business agility and react expeditiously to any major changes.

Manually sourcing, tracking, and verifying data across siloed systems is a slow and error-prone process that can be damaging to an organization’s overall performance and reputation. Utilizing an integrated data ecosystem that spans across the entire enterprise is an effective way of reducing reporting-related risks and costs. You’ll be able to access established data structures for known use cases and meet future business demands more quickly—even those you may not have foreseen.

Extensible and Scalable

A robust, extensible data ecosystem will protect your company from being caught off guard by changes in the business and regulatory environment. Look for all-in-one cloud-based data management services that will enable you to build applications that are highly scalable and support all data types, including graph data, relational data, and structured or unstructured nonrelational data. Utilizing this technology ensures that your organization will have access to all the information it needs, presented in the most productive possible way, at any given time.

As previously mentioned, having to spend less time on reconciliation opens up more time for meaningful data analysis. More concretely, this means your company will have more space to develop insightful products and useful offers for customers, thereby driving overall profitability upwards.

Traceable and Transparent

The need to ensure data accuracy and integrity is one major reason manually compiling data for regulatory audits is so intensely time- and labor-intensive. Inconsistencies such as double entries and erroneous calculations can cost an organization dearly in penalty fees alone. The volume and granularity of such manual work, however, makes errors all but inevitable from even the most diligent and well-trained of personnel.

Good data foundation solutions, meanwhile, will be able to gather and process even the most difficult data and standards with ease. Such software likewise comes equipped with features for extensive data tracking, ensuring full transparency and comprehensive records throughout every step of the reporting process. Your company will no longer run the risk of missing deadlines, running up substantial operating costs, or facing hefty penalties.

As data interactions accelerate and more important information from the market becomes available in real time, developing an efficient data management strategy becomes a must for companies of any side. Organizations seeking to operate competitively today need a solid data foundation that can help them adapt to and rise above the demands of the current business landscape.

Take These Vital Steps To Keep Your Business Data Secure

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StrategyDriven Organisational Performance Measures Article |Keep your data secure|Take These Vital Steps To Keep Your Business Data SecureToday, consumers and business clients are paranoid about data security. They are constantly fearful that the data held by companies is leaving them vulnerable and open to cases of fraud or scams. That’s why it’s important for every business to take the right steps to secure all business data. Here are the possibilities that we recommend.

Research Standards To Remain Compliant

To help protect customers numerous new regulations have been brought in relating to data security. When you are running your business it is important that you remain compliant with these standards and regulations. For instance, you could be running an accounting firm. If that’s the case, you need to make sure that the software you are using is compliant. Accounting practice software that is compliant will be advertised as such so there should be no confusion here.

Hire An IT Support Team

One of the greatest risks for your business data security is the potential of a hack. It’s important to be able to recognize the key signs of a hack and address them accordingly without any delays. That’s why you should think about hiring an IT support team. An IT support team will monitor your network along with your different systems to check for any issues here and ensure that you are not leaving your business vulnerable. They can also guarantee that your business network and anything like your cloud solution is set up correctly from the first day that you decide to enter the market.

Invest In The Right Level Of Training

Next, you should think abou investing in the right level of training in your business model. The best training will ensure that you don’t have to worry about issues with security developing because your team members weren’t able to recognise the signs of a threat. Phishing scams are becoming more common in a range of different industries. The problem with phishing scams is that they will target team members at various different levels. Investing in training can help team members identify phishing scams so they don’t become victims of an attack like this, giving away sensitive data to the wrong source.

Use A Disaster Recovery Service

Finally, while your main goal should always be to prevent a hack, you do need to think about taking the right step after a hack occurs. More often than not, this is going to mean a full disaster recovery. Without the right plan in place this could take weeks or even months and cost your business thousands due to downtime. With a plan, you can get everything back up and running in minutes. You should speak to your IT support team about this possibility. They should be able to provide you with all the right options here that you need.

We hope this helps you understand some of the key steps that must be taken to ensure that your business data does remain secure. In doing so, you can avoid incidents that could obliterate your brand and cause you to lose the support of your clients.