Data has become one of the most valuable assets a business can have. It can be used to understand customer behaviour, optimise operations, and make better decisions. However, having data alone is not enough. To leverage its potential, a data strategy must be put in place and a data-driven culture established. Here are 5 steps to help you get started.
Step 1: Understand your business goals and KPIs.
Before implementing a data strategy, it is important to understand your business goals and identify the KPIs that are relevant to those goals. This will help you determine what data you need to collect and analyse.
A study by NewVantage Partners found that 91.9% of businesses had been able to create new opportunities by leveraging their data. However, only 20.6% of businesses had established a data-driven culture. To continue to benefit from data-driven opportunities, beyond the low-hanging fruit, you need to establish a data-driven culture. Setting clear business goals and KPIs that guide your data strategy will help develop a data-driven culture.
Step 2: Assess your data maturity level
It’s important to know where you are in your data journey and what steps you need to take to progress your organisation’s data maturity. Evaluating your data management processes, technology, and people will help you assess your maturity level and identify areas where you need to improve and prioritise your efforts.
Step 3: Define your data governance framework
Data is fast becoming the most significant asset many organisations possess, so it’s important to protect it. Your data governance framework will establish policies and procedures for managing your data, ensuring data quality, and protecting data privacy and security. To fully leverage the value of data, it must be managed effectively. A strong data governance framework can help you ensure that your data is accurate, reliable, and secure. This can increase trust in your data and improve decision-making.
Step 4. Identify your data sources and implement data collection
Collecting the right data can help you gain insights into customer behaviour, identify opportunities for growth, and optimise operations. This involves collecting data from various sources such as customer interactions, sales transactions, and website analytics. But a collection of data isn’t that informative on its own. The real value comes when you can link data from a variety of sources to paint a clear picture of customer behaviour. A customer data platform can unite data from various sources to build the long-anticipated “single view of a customer” marketers have been craving.
Step 5: Implement data analysis and visualisation
Making insights available and useable is key to building a data-driven culture. Using tools and techniques such as a customer data platform, data mining, machine learning, and visualisation you can extract insights from your data and serve them to the right teams at the right time, building a data-driven culture.