You made have heard that data is now the most valuable resource in the world. In 2017 The Economist published an article explaining this. Forbes wrote that "Data is The New Oil" and most recently TechCrunch published "Data is the world's most valuable (and vulnerable) resource".
I would take this to the next level, though. Thus the title of this article:
"Data is Now the Most Valuable Resource! (But not automatically for you)".
Data favors the adventurous. It benefits them.
Data ruins the complacent. It punishes them.
In other words, you have to actively embrace and leverage data in order to squeeze out the power of data for your organization. You cannot simply rely on data to bring value to you, but rather, you need to learn about data and how it can be used to bring value to you.
Don't Be Satisfied with the Data that You have
Too many companies do not understand data and rely on the data that is provided to them. They access Google Analytics when they are looking for data about their website traffic. They login to Google Search Console when they need data about searches or indexing data. I could go on and on. So many tools and each one has a dashboard.
What happens if you have no platform that provides you the ideal data. How do you combine data from different places? How do you visualize different data that you currently can't visualize now? If you settle and don't figure this out you are missing out.
A Guide to Developing a Business Intelligence Strategy for Contractors
A Data Exercise
We do a data exercise every time we onboard a new client. We make a list of all data that our new client has access to. We make a list of all of their dashboards.
Then we ask our client a question.
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"In an ideal world, if you could have any data what would it be and how would it help you?"
Usually they have more than one answer. Sometimes this ideal data could be data that would help them with their operations and sometimes it could be data that would help them with marketing. We have helped many companies and have many ways that we have used data for other clients which helps improve their marketing results (we will be talking about these in future issues of our newsletter).
Don't Just Use Data to Measure Results - Use It to Create Measurable Results
Many companies just think of data as a tool to measure something. They make take different steps based on the results. We do this sometimes. We certainly use some data for measurement as should you. Measurement should not be the only way that you use data.
If you really want to benefit from data you have to think differently about it. You need to figure out ways to make your data do what you want it to do. To Create Results. I am talking about Actionable Data. We do this for our clients and the results are amazing.
This Actionable Data has allowed us to help one client save over $700,000 dollars (eliminated PPC ads) and help generate revenue of over $20MM. Read more: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/increase-your-revenue-per-sale-using-data-jim-oborny
Best,
Jim
