I read an interesting article the other day about how a novel targeted at young, single females and housewives wasn’t selling as well as expected, writes Charles Teversham, MD of Sage Intelligence.
When the publisher looked deeper into its sales data, it found that this market segment made up only a small portion of readers — and that the majority of buyers were actually older women and men.

The publisher acted on this information, adjusted its marketing strategy and book sales increased substantially. It made me think about the value of data to small businesses and the transformative impact data-driven decisions can have on companies of any size — especially on the bottom line.

Yet small business owners are still wary of data, believing they don’t have access to the tools and skills needed to process huge volumes of information.

The truth is that your small business has been producing data for a long time and, by not acting on that information, you could be missing out on unexpected growth opportunities.

Why should small businesses care about data?

It’s easy for a small business owner to get overwhelmed when faced with mountains of data. Often, they don’t know where to start or what questions to ask of the data.

My advice is to start small. Identify a specific business problem and play around with your data until you have an answer.

Some questions you might want to ask include:

* Am I targeting the right audience?

* Why is product X selling so well in one area but not another?

* Why did my sales peak on this specific day and how do I repeat that?

Even if you don’t have a lot of data in your internal systems, you can still access free public data sources — like weather, mapping, market research and government data. The most powerful data — from your website traffic patterns and social media sentiment — can be easily accessed and analysed using tools like Google Analytics and social listening platforms (such as Buffer and HootSuite).

Data analytics tools are getting easier to use. Most good solutions today feature powerful visualisation tools that let you see a trend as a graph or a chart, making it easier to understand. Many others use familiar interfaces like Excel so that you don’t need lots of training to make sense of your data. The barriers to entry are becoming lower, thanks to these easy-to-use tools.

The other good news is that small businesses have less data to worry about but the insights they can get from that data could have a massive impact on their operations and profit.

The more you know, the better decisions you can make for your business. It starts with knowing the problem you’re trying to solve and being agile enough to act on the insights you find in your data.