Sometimes you’ll see a new restaurant and, just by glancing at a menu posted outside, you decide to take a chance and order something.
There might be a T-shirt in a colour you’ve never tried before. You’re not sure if you can pull it off, but why not give it a try?
Occasionally you might even buy a lottery ticket, especially if the proceeds go towards a good cause. Maybe the odds of winning aren’t great, but you never know.
In the grand scheme of things, these are all reasonable risks to take. If you’re running a small or medium-sized business, though, you can’t afford for your business strategy to be completely informed by chance.
Hopefully you started out with a fully fleshed-out business plan that included background research about your total addressable market, the funding you’d need to market products and how you’d grow revenues following your launch.
If all went well, you might be ready to accelerate your path to growth. This can be where things seem to get a little more dicey.
Every businesses needs to contend with the unexpected, whether it’s fluctuations in the economy, sudden spikes in demand or just changes in customer behaviour. if you operate a physical location. You have no choice but to tackle problems as they arise.
At the other end, however, are opportunities to attract more customers, optimize your costs or improve the experience you’re trying to deliver.
The actions you take to pursue these opportunities will not always be sure bets. There’s a chance you could actually lose money, turn customers off or simply waste a lot of time and other resources.
This is where making strategic use of data — collected and managed through platforms like a CRM or marketing automation, for instance — can make taking chances less of a shot in the dark.
Look around and you’ll see how you can take data from across your company and move forward with confidence. This includes taking chances like:
Redesigning Your Website
Your online presence is a critical way for customers to learn more about your products and services, how to buy from you and even your company’s values. Setting up a site is often a significant investment at the outset, which means making an overhaul or even minor tweaks could come at a cost.
Get your website redesign wrong and you might see your search engine ranking drop. Even if customers do find you online, they might not discover what they came to explore. And the competition, of course, is only a click away.
A data-driven approach to website design doesn’t start with choosing colours or the shape of buttons. You should look at your marketing automation platform to see which landing pages or sections or your site have driven the most engagement from customers to date. Maybe those areas need to be more visible from the home page.
Look at the time your visitors are spending in specific areas of your site, and where they exit to browse somewhere else. This might indicate the kinds of questions they’re trying to answer. Your redesign could get one step ahead of those questions by including a chatbot, explainer videos or simply a better FAQ page.
Embracing A New Social Media Channel
There are so many platforms where customers now spend their time. Options that were once limited to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have now expanded to include Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest and TikTok.
You might be worried about missing opportunities to connect with customers where they are, but you also have to be mindful about what it takes to manage your company’s presence on social media. Throw all your eggs in every basket and you might come up empty-handed.
The data sources you could turn to here should include your customer service management platform. It will show how many people within your customer base might be already reaching out through other social channels, and your priority should be on making sure you’re able to respond.
You can also conduct tests by using paid advertising on social platforms to show off your best marketing content. If the data indicates your target audience is responding, maybe it’s time to create a dedicated account and aim for more organic activity.
Be sure to consider the fact that your sales team can also use social media channels to move customer relationships from interest to purchase. If you look at how social selling has contributed to revenue based on data in your CRM, you might get a better idea of which services should be the main focus for your company.
Launching New Products Or Services
Growing your business often means adding to the portfolio of what you’ve offered to your customers so far. This can be a big step for SMBs, though, with big consequences if new products or services flop.
You don’t want to waste your R&D budget on goods customers don’t want or need. This will have a spillover effect on the marketing content you create and even the time your sales team spends on driving new business.
Again, your CRM is a treasure trove of information about customer pain points and desires, which should help guide your product and service roadmap.
If you don’t have the data you need there, though, consider other channels or touchpoints you could use to gather it now. Host a live customer town hall on social media, for example. Have a survey pop up within your website or mobile app. Even your customer service team could ask for input as they finish resolving a case.
There aren’t too many successful companies that got to where they are by playing it safe all the time. Taking chances can be part of the thrill of running a business.
When you back up your plan with data, however, taking chances becomes less like throwing caution to the wind, and more like moving in the direction the wind is already blowing.
