Having a carefully crafted data strategy is now more important than ever before; with so much data being produced every hour and a vast array of tools available to use it to your advantage, it’s essential that your whole team is on the same page.
With this in mind here are the steps you need to take to put together an effective data strategy for your company.
First… Why It’s Important
There are several reasons why a data strategy is becoming so essential for today’s businesses. Firstly, it allows your company to be as agile as possible, and this is vital given that it’s those who are able to change and adapt are the ones that make it long-term.
Having a data strategy is also important when it comes to making better business decisions. Relying on gut instinct may have been acceptable once upon a time, but with such detailed insights now available it makes sense to lower your risks before committing to new plans.
Finally, a data strategy can also help you to cut costs. Monitoring data such as sales and outgoings over a period of time can enable you to spot patterns that can ultimately help you to increase your revenue or lower your expenses. For example, you might establish that you sell more at certain times of the year, or selling to an industry you hadn’t been targeting previously.
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Building Your Data Strategy
Now we’ve established why you should be putting together a data strategy, let’s explore the steps you need to take to do just that.
1. Determine Your Goals
For example, if you’re expanding your business to target Malaysian paper companies, it’s better to collect only the most relevant data. This would include things like the industry total revenue, number of companies in the niche, market share of the top companies etc.
2. Find the Right Data
3. Make Cross-Department Sharing Easier
4. Integrate Wherever Possible
5. Encourage a Data Culture
As Amy Palmer, the Content Marketer at Global Database mentioned in her recent interview,
“There are several ways to go about doing this. Firstly, it’s important to create opportunities for your staff to develop professionally and learn new skills so that they feel comfortable using new systems and also to ensure you keep up to date. It’s also imperative that you monitor the trends within your niche as well looking to sources such as professional organizations in order to determine what technologies you need to adapt and also to help you find top-tier data talent.”
Finally, when it comes to seeing data as an asset within your organization, you should always aim to lead by example by demonstrating how you utilize data in your own working day and allow for data-driven decisions. This will give your team more confidence when it comes to their own data-lead activities and will make them feel comfortable working autonomously with different data types.
6. Protect Your Data
Staying up to date is vital when it comes to remaining compliant, as new regulations are introduced, so your strategy should be nimble enough to adapt accordingly.
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7. Keep Testing
In Summary…
Building an effective data strategy is now extremely important given how vital data has become to businesses, and will continue to be in the future. Without crafting a well-designed roadmap for exactly how you’ll use data to help reach your goals, you run the risk of losing sight of your objectives along the way and there won’t be a unified approach to data and its use across your organization.