How startups can leverage Data for Success

“Who is my most ideal customer”; is the first question every business, product, or service must ask.

As a business owner or startup founder, it is important to realise that not everybody is interested in what you’re trying to sell. At the same time, there is a customer base that would actually pay for the genuine problems that they face.

If you have the solution, it is important to recognise this set of people as the first step to make sure the efforts are getting the results that you deserve. It is said that 20% of what one does drives 80% of the results; it is absolutely essential to pinpoint to this 20% of activities and data will help you do it.

Analytical CRM for startups

If you have a marketing or lead generation strategy, you’re already doing analytics even if you haven’t specifically thought about using data. Data is nothing but numbers and information.

A question that all startups need to ask and answer is “how are we doing?”; this involves analysing numbers and information at a basic level which in essence is data analytics at a basic level.

The most important aspect of leveraging data is to find the right customers and differentiate those that do not belong. It is essential to make sure that the efforts are not going in the wrong direction. Sometimes even the right strategy will not enable results if it is directed towards the wrong audience.

Here’s how data can help you recognise this for your startup:

• Demographics: This includes age, gender, interests, and various other attributes that help you differentiate between groups of people.
• Behavioural patterns: This involves the thought process and psychological behaviour of the particular demographic of interest for your business.

Analysing these two aspects drives the entire marketing and customer acquisition journey for any startup. Data analytics makes this process (which also happens to be vital for growth) easy and simple.

Tools like Google Analytics makes this entire workflow simple and easy to track with almost all functionalities that helps you recognise your customer base, their demographics, their interests, their behaviour on your website, conversion rates, and also in showcasing returning users and customers.

Data can also be leveraged to understand the Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) which happens to be the single most important factor for any small business in its early stages.

CPA helps you recognise where the startup is bleeding funds unnecessarily, redirect it towards something more useful, and get better results by reducing it. While CRM is the first step to using data, there are also other areas that a startup can leverage data to its advantage.

Building a top-down data strategy right from inception

One of the key decisions that will aid your startup is to build a top-down data culture right from the seniors and founding partners to junior employees in the initial stages. It helps if the entire team thinks around data even if it is at varying levels based on experience and field of expertise.

Having a data strategy that is driven by the seniors, executed by the managers, and made aware to juniors helps execute analytics and data decisions effectively.

The key factor to achieving this is to find the right team with shared values and interests that have a common goal and can think cohesively at all levels in the organisation. No matter how small the task, having that vision as to why it is being done, how that involves using data, which in turn drives the vision of the organisation will help your startup thrive and flourish.

Investing in people will always pay the best returns. Building a data-centric culture and making the employees realise how they can track their work logically with measurable results helps all departments of work including Finance, Marketing, Human Resources, and the Data Analytics team itself.

As mentioned previously, data can be leveraged in all domains of work along with the initial customer acquisition. Marketing Analytics, HR Analytics, and Financial Analytics are some of the examples which cover almost all the areas of work required to run an organisation.

A startup that recognises the value of data, builds a culture around it from inception and helps the employees think SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, timed) is bound to do better than it would otherwise. The world as we know it today is data-driven and the one that embraces an analytical approach will most definitely achieve better results for themselves and subsequently their customers, employees, and organisation.