Top-quality data currently represents one of the most important resources for any company. This is especially true for young businesses that don’t have much experience in their market and that still don’t know enough about their customers. Startups that lack familiarity with important tendencies and trends in their industry need to have this crucial data at their disposal from day one.
Making data-driven decisions and creating data-driven strategies has already become a standard in most organizations. This means that those who don’t adapt to this practice are almost certainly destined to fall behind. Here are some of the reasons why data science is so important for entrepreneurs around the globe.
Knowing Your Customers
Obviously, in order to make your startup a success, you need to know who you’re selling to and who you’re addressing. Data science helps you find out what users who belong to your target market search for, what their interests are, or how they spend their time online. You can also identify your customers’ fears, pain points, and issues that your product can potentially resolve.
This can be beneficial in multiple ways. When it comes to product development, you’ll be aware of the vital aspects of the product you need to improve or focus on. On the other hand, your sales and marketing teams will know what they should insist on when trying to sell it, how exactly they should address the prospects, and which channels they ought to use to reach them.
Keep in mind that this is not a one-time thing, but rather a continuous process. Your market and the buying habits of consumers can change as a result of different external factors. For instance, the global pandemic has influenced average household spending, price sensitivity, and overall shopping behavior. These are all vital info that you need to take into account when devising a broader business strategy.
Learning about Your Competition
Now, in order to truly know your market, it’s not enough to analyze your audience. You also need to have accurate and timely info about your competition, and data science can be of huge help with this.
Your competition consists of companies that develop similar products or whose target audience overlaps with your own. Thorough data analysis will help you identify which businesses are your competition in the first place. You’ll discover the industry leaders and you’ll have a chance to study their online presence in detail.
Having the right info about your competitors’ websites’ performance or their social media presence can tell you a lot about overall market potential. Most importantly, you can find the most common search queries related to them and get a glimpse of the feedback they get from their customers.
This will be very valuable when you get to defining your unique selling proposition (USP). You’ll discover the biggest downsides of their products and you’ll have a chance to figure out why your own product is better or unique. Once you have all this info, you need to focus your marketing and sales efforts on these unique features of your product. This is a great way to show why you’re better than your rivals and gain some crucial competitive advantage.
Using the Power of Personalization
Consumers’ expectations of brands are now higher than ever. They expect you not just to speak their language and understand their needs but also to ensure they have a highly-personalized experience throughout their buyer’s journey.
Namely, 80% of consumers are more likely to do business with a company that offers personalized experiences. Having a solid personalization strategy helps startups target individual customers, reach out to them, and offer them the right products at the right time. This means investing in advanced recommendation engines, highly-personalized paid ads, and customized landing pages created to suit specific users.
To achieve all this, you need a ton of high-quality data. And you need more than just a huge pool of unsorted, disparate data. You’ll have to employ strong predictive algorithms that will utilize previous user behavior to anticipate the specific consumer’s upcoming moves and needs. People are only going to get more accustomed to personalized experiences, and brands that fail to recognize this fact will have a hard time conducting business.
Improving Your Digital Presence
As online retail worldwide grows at an enormous speed, your online presence is becoming increasingly important. Data science can help you lay out a well-informed digital strategy and optimize the performance of your digital channels.
First of all, you can use it to improve your website. A thorough analysis of each page can uncover some potential UX problems. Advanced methods such as heat maps or session replays can tell you a lot about which parts of specific pages are often overlooked or where users tend to dwell for a long time, failing to find what they’re looking for. This is a great way to figure out which specific features and elements your design team needs to work on.
The same goes for your blog posts or the content you post on social networks. Cold, hard data can unveil a lot of weak spots in your content strategy. First, you’ll need to identify the low-performing types of content or pieces of content. After that, try figuring out what’s wrong about them and revise your strategy, or simply eliminate that sort of content altogether.
Automating Workflows
Data science can also help you improve the efficiency of your inner business activities and operations. Letting the software make some small day-to-day decisions and automate some tiresome, repetitive tasks can make your employees and entire departments more productive.
For instance, you can utilize automatic task delegation. The decision who gets appointed with a certain task is made entirely by the software. It’s based on various pieces of data that a human decision-maker would need some time to gather and analyze. These can include factors like sales reps’ geographical location or previous performance of specific reps with similar clients. This decision happens in a fraction of a second, and it is based on objective, comprehensive, and carefully processed data.
Moreover, you can use data science to monitor and evaluate your employees’ work. Your personal assessment, based entirely on instincts and subjective experience, may often be incomplete or biased. By turning to facts and data, it’s much easier to see exactly who’s slacking, who’s excelling in certain areas, and which departments need definite improvement.
Final Thoughts
Of course, paying due attention to crucial data doesn’t mean minimizing the importance of entrepreneurial spirit, business talent, and innovative ideas. But all these need to be reinforced with solid data science in order to bring the best possible results. In the times ahead of us, accurate, actionable data will be essential for the growth of any startup. Businesses will continue to go digital; the amount of data will increase substantially, the algorithms will get more advanced–and only those who can properly adapt to this new reality will have a chance for true success.
