Why is data so important for your business? This is why…
Collecting and organising data can be incredibly powerful for a business. You can gain a huge amount of insight about your business and how it performs, from products to services to marketing and sales processes.
When we talk about data, we’re simply talking about information. This could be information from how long it takes to get customers from lead to sale or how much your cost per lead is to user behaviour on your website or app.
Most businesses so know this but aren’t sure about the best ways to collect, process and read the data they have to get the insights they want or need. This is understandable. Knowing your industry inside out doesn’t make you an expert at data analysis, why would it? This is something most businesses need some specialist help with, from people who understand what insights would benefit your business.
If you can figure this out (and we’re here to help) you could put yourself at a big advantage to competitors who don’t.
With a proper click-stream analytics setup and a basic understanding of Google Analytics, channel tracking, and other qualitative data analytics platforms, you could focus on an unlimited amount of insights, but, it’s always better to hone in on a few key things so as not to get distracted.
Right now, maybe you’re tracking a few key events within your product (events being, key stages of customer interaction). You might also be trying to implement UTM tags to distinguish your marketing campaigns. But are you consistent? Are you aware of your funnel metrics? Do you get behavioural insights of your users? If not, you could be missing out on a lot of useful information that can save you time and money.
A lot of time can be wasted trying to interpret data if you don’t have proper data sets to analyse. Even if your data sets are low right now, because you don’t have many users or customers, over time they will add up. It is all about getting yourself in a position where you have the maximum amount of useful data to inform your decisions.
note: An interesting read here about why data is important for your business.
Where Data is Useful at Different Stages of Your Business
Data is useful at every stage of a business, whether you’ve just got a landing page, or you’re well into your third round of funding. Let’s look at a few examples of why…
Question: Should we collect data even if we just have a landing page?
Answer: Yes. You might be testing an idea or concept, your target market and your value propositions, or a new potential feature before building it. To test accurately, you need data.
The best way to do quick tests in order to make constant incremental improvements across your website is by rapid traction testing. This allows you to invest more time, effort and money in what works, and less in what doesn’t. Rapid traction testing requires accurate data gathering and constant analysis.
When we test a landing page, we want to get a full picture by tracking user behaviour across the page, and across channels — both quantitative and qualitative. Using a combination of custom event tracking (JavaScript, Google Analytics), multi-channel grouping (Google Analytics) and behavioural analytics (Hotjar or else) will get me into a position where none of the money I spend on testing is wasted and all data sets can be analysed thoughtfully.
Question: What about if we’ve only just released our product?
Answer: The sooner you start, the more data you can collect over time.
Why is that important?
Okay, let’s look at an example of data use in action:
There are two companies that are trying to build and release a product. Let’s call them Group 1 and Group 2.
Group 1 starts by building a feature first, then they release the product onto the market improving it feature by feature over time.
Group 2 build multiple features first, and then eventually deploy the product only when everything is finished.
Whether you’re in Group 1 or Group 2, you want to track every possible feature usage within your product so you can see if it’s working the way you hoped or expected.
Once your user registers, what do they do? When they leave the product, website or app and come back, what are they doing and how are they doing it? If you can’t answer these questions, you could be wasting your time improving or building a feature.
Finding product-market-fit is the most important stage. Mistakes at this stage have killed many start-up companies as they waste time and resources on dead-end projects.
At this stage, being data-driven will allow you to rapidly iterate, build, destroy, and start again if you need to.
Data analytics when you’re growing your product
Now that you’re ready to grow your product, there will be one KPI — or multiple KPIs – that you need to drive up. Your investors will want that KPI at every stage.
While you may have some data on your KPIs, do you really know what’s impacting their growth? Which actions are related to it? Where are users dropping off in your funnels? Which channels you should be focusing on and increasing your marketing activity?
Knowing this stuff will give you the best chance of success.
Let’s say you have completed all the steps above and you are now a mega startup with Series A, B, or C investments.
You’ll now have a LOT of data. Once you have so much data, you’re stumbling upon other problems. Data is all over the place, and maybe you’re having a hard time maintaining any infrastructure with constant product deployment. It’s really easy for this to happen but don’t worry, it can be rectified!
So, where do you start and how do you analyse all this data? How do you find insights to inform the growth, marketing and product team? Read on…
How to Get Access to Your Data
There are usually 3 main bottlenecks when it comes to data stacks.
Problem number 1: Your devs don’t understand, or worse – they don’t care!
Either the internal dev team or external dev team, they don’t care about analytics. Or, they have other priorities. They’ve focused on building products and features and making sure everything works. Developers often think that analytics is boring as hell.
Unfortunately, your dev team are the ones with the technical know-how to implement analytics across the product. But it can be hard to convince people to put effort into something they’re not interested in, or can’t see the value of.
Problem number 2: Your marketing team need the data, but no one knows how to implement Analytics…
Everyone else on the team other than the devs needs different kinds of data for different purposes. Everyone wants the data served in different sized plates like an 8-course dinner. In many cases, team members aren’t even aware of the insights they could have.
Without data, we’re all constantly making non-data-driven decisions. Decisions should be based on insights gleaned from data, not just on gut feeling.
Problem number 3: Who has this skill? It requires knowledge in every domain.
It’s quite a cross-domain niche skill. You need to be able to understand all product and growth needs and turn it into action by implementing the technical infrastructure.
Hiring a data engineer/analyst full time for a small business is relatively impossible before having some serious capital. It is, for me, a highly valuable secondary skill.
You have three choices:
1) Understand how it works by upskilling and becoming the link between all the teams.
Get a good understanding of both the data requirements for you and your teams and how to technically implement it. This way, you’ll have all the answers and options.
2) Hire someone full time
Getting someone full time to do the job probably isn’t possible unless you have the funds. If you do, great, but until then it’ll probably be a growth engineer with in-depth analytics knowledge.
3) Get an external expert to handle it.
Until you get the skill in-house, that is the most viable solution. You can hire an expert for a few hours a week. That’s the kind of service we provide with The Growth Hustlers, for example.
The Growth Hustlers Analytics Experts, what we do.
We provide high-level data technical consultancy to build your analytics and train your team so that they can get valuable insights.
We don’t just build you a one-size-fits-none data stack and run away, expecting you to get on with it. This can result in short term change, but The Growth Hustlers offer very flexible packages tailored for your company needs and product. We then work with you to make it happen. We run workshops and constant Q&A’s that help you and your team to upskill data analysis and data engineering.
By working with us, you invest in yourself.
Solution 1: We build click-stream channel tracking analytics stacks:
By implementing custom events schema tailor-made with your product and growth needs, we give you total access to the data you need to inform your product development, growth and marketing efforts.
This works by configuring Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics and other behavioural platforms. We will provide in-depth expertise in what data points your startup needs. And always make sure to build stacks that’ll last at scale, collecting the data you’ll need in the future.
Also, we run multiple workshops for you and your teams to ensure you get all the knowledge you need to use and maintain the brand-new stack.
Solution 2: We build complete advanced data strategies:
When you want to get to the next level and get unlimited access to in-depth insights, finding answers to complex questions, you need to build a complete data strategy.
How? By aggregating all the data sources you’re using and formatting the data to link the entire actions of a user before, during, and after they register on your product into a single table of interlinked records. You’ll be able to have full visibility on the entire user journey.
A data strategy will power your advanced growth reports and business intelligence visualisation reports. It will also empower you to run advanced marketing automation.
Solution 3: We provide on-going analytics technical consulting:
We provide on-going technical consultancy to get yourself regular access to data engineer experts for your team.
Our expert will build and maintain your stacks week on week, month on month. You’ll get access to a resource with knowledge over the entire data and growth process at any time.
Interested to learn more?
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