Entrepreneur magazine has published columns by the CEOs of two startups this week that emphasize the importance of applying data analytics to marketing strategies. Comprehensive data, they argue, is essential for companies to understand their target audience and adjust their services accordingly, ensuring their sustained growth. From the articles, it is possible to glean three simple but essential tips to best apply data gathering to marketing:
- Methodical planning: It is important for business owners to understand that data analysis is an ongoing process, and one that requires care and continued work in order to produce results. While an effective use of analytics can pay immediate dividends, it is in a company's best interest to ensure that benefits are sustained over time.
- Analyze past trends to foresee coming ones: Data can reveal a lot of information about past consumer trends but, more critically, it can also help predict emerging and even future trends, giving the savvy business manager a significant advantage to stay ahead of the curve.
- Personalized service: With so much information at their fingertips, business owners can market their products to a target audience as broad or as narrow as they want, based on their size and production capabilities. Other customized data that can be accounted for includes information on competitors' strengths and weaknesses.
FileMaker is a customizable database tool that can help companies achieve all of these goals. Certified FileMaker developers can create databases specific to each client, allowing businesses to collate and analyze all the information they need to ensure that they understand their market and are able to provide excellent service. Moreover, training services are also available, and licensed providers of such services can help businesses by teaching their employees how to use FileMaker, so that they may modify and update their own databases as needed, ensuring that no market trend takes them unawares.