Having an abundance of marketing metrics at your disposal is certainly a major benefit for your business, but it can often be challenging to identify the right metrics to focus on. While there are a variety of common metrics that all businesses typically evaluate, there are many others that fly under the radar. In many instances, focusing on some of these overlooked metrics can pay huge dividends and provide valuable information to help grow your business.

Tips for Identifying the Right Marketing Metrics to Track

It’s often helpful to look beyond the basic metrics associated with your marketing goals in order to gain a more holistic picture of how your marketing efforts are impacting the overall success of your business. The following tips will help you figure out which additional metrics to focus on:

• Track both marketing and sales metrics – Your marketing and sales departments must work in conjunction with each other to effectively grow your business. Evaluating data for both departments will provide you with a more comprehensive view of how your efforts are impacting the success of both teams and help you identify areas for improvement that will complement both teams.
• Consider metrics that provide deeper insights – Lead generation and revenue metrics are always critical to track, but it’s also important to evaluate items that provide deeper insights into the long-term value and success of your marketing efforts.
• Evaluate metrics at every stage of the buyer’s journey – Tracking metrics at every stage of the buyer’s journey, from awareness to conversion, allows you to optimize your ability to guide prospects through your funnel. This will help you maximize conversions.

Overlooked SEO Metrics

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a critical component to any digital marketing strategy. Without effective SEO, it will be extremely challenging to rank well on search engines and ensure your target audience is able to find you. If you’re unable to drive traffic to your website, it will be much harder to hit your lead generation goals.

The following overlooked metrics can help you understand the impact of your SEO efforts.

Average Position

Average position can be used to determine how your overall search rankings are performing over time. This metric is calculated by taking the sum of all your keyword rankings and dividing this figure by the total number of keywords you’re tracking on your website.

Branded Searches

Branded searches refer to search queries that contain your brand name or a variation of your name. Branded search terms should always be segmented out and evaluated separately from the other keywords you track since they typically have a higher click through rate, convert at higher levels, and allow you to understand the impact of your brand awareness among your target audience more clearly.

Conversion Rates

Not all website traffic is created equal. A certain keyword may drive a tremendous amount of traffic to your website, but this traffic doesn’t help you grow your business if it doesn’t covert. Knowing conversion rates helps you understand which keywords are bringing in the highest quality visitors – in other words, the visitors that are most likely to turn into a sale or contact you for a consultation. Often, a keyword bringing in fewer monthly visitors but converting at a much higher rate may be more valuable to target than a keyword driving a ton of traffic but not delivering many conversions.

Overlooked Content Marketing Metrics

Content is a critical component of your marketing strategy. It supports SEO, helps convey your brand messaging, establishes your business as an authoritative expert, and lets your audience know why they should choose you over your competitors. The following content marketing metrics are frequently overlooked, but provide great insight into how well your content is addressing the needs of your audience.

Returning Visitors

While it’s possible to generate leads from one-time viewers of your content, these people are often simply reading your blog posts or web pages as part of their research process. However, when the same user returns to your blog or a specific piece of content over and over again, it is a sign that they find the information you provide to be very useful. This will significantly increase the likelihood that they will eventually choose you when they’re ready to make a purchase.

For this reason, returning visitors is an important content marketing metric to track. Google Analytics not only tracks the total number of website visitors you have, but they also let you know how many of these visitors are new vs. returning users. By tracking this metric month over month, you can determine whether your number of returning visitors is growing, shrinking or remaining constant. This is an effectively way to understand how well you’re cultivating an upper tier of audience members who:

• Are highly engaged in your business
• View you as a trusted leader
• Regularly share your content with their social networks
• Are more likely to eventually become a customer/client

Engaged Readers

While the average time spent on a page is a commonly used metric to track the engagement level of your readers, it doesn’t always provide a full picture to the true engagement level of your viewers. For example, if you have a video embedded near the top of a page, someone who views the entire video will increase the average time spent on this page. But if that person never goes below the video to read the rest of the page, they aren’t necessarily engaging with your content.

A more effective way to assess the engagement of your readers is to set up event tracking goals in Google Analytics which tell you how far a reader scrolls down the page. There are two useful goals to set:

• Readers – Someone will be considered a “reader” of your page or blog if they engage with the majority of content on the page. You can set whatever scrolling point you feel demonstrates this level of engagement, and anyone who reaches this point in the page will be considered a reader.
• Finishers – You can set a scroll point to the average length of your blog posts to determine who many of these people are actually reading the entire post.

Content Downloads

Gated content pieces are an effective strategy to grow your list of contacts. These are downloadable pieces of content such as guides, eBooks, white papers, or brochures that are offered in exchange for a user providing their email address. Gated content allows you to retarget these users with other aspects of your marketing strategy, such as via email marketing campaigns, to help nurture them through your funnel.

Tracking content downloads helps you understand which of these larger content pieces resonate most with your audience, and it helps you identify individuals who are eager to consume your content. If you create several gated content pieces to support different points in the marketing funnel, this metric will also help you to measure the success of content at each of these points in your funnel.

Overlooked Email Marketing Metrics

Email marketing is an effective way to leverage your contact list to grow your business. By engaging with your audience through regular email newsletters, you can establish yourself as an authoritative expert, grow your brand, and stay top of mind for when they are ready to purchase. While open and click-through rates are commonly tracked, the following overlooked metrics will provide you with a deeper insight into the success of your email marketing efforts.

Opens by Device

If you know how your audience likes to read your emails, it will help you identify the optimal design to provide the best user experience. While you should always choose a design that provides a good experience on mobile and desktop, you should take additional steps to prioritize the experience on the type of device the majority of your audience is using. This is especially true if your audience typically reads your emails on their phone.

List Growth

Adding new readers to your email list is critical to the success of your efforts. Even if you maintain a low unsubscribe rate, the size of your lists will gradually decrease over time if you fail to grow your audience.

Tracking list growth will help you understand when you need to invest more energy and resources into adding more readers. This can be accomplished by encouraging existing readers to share your content, adding more CTAs to your website prompting visitors to subscribe, or creating new gated content pieces to encourage website visitors to give you their email contact information.

Traffic Drivers

It’s important to know which links in your email are actually driving traffic back to your website or blog posts. You can set up UTM tracking codes in Google Analytics that will allow you to track which links in your emails are delivering the most viewers back to your desired location. This helps you determine which email content is the most and least engaging, which content drives the most and least traffic, and which content generates the most and least sales.

Overlooked Social Media Metrics

Social media has become an increasingly important component of marketing strategies over the last decade. These platforms allow you to connect with your audience in vastly different ways than you do on your website and blog. You can interact with your audience in an authentic way that helps you grow your brand and expand your reach. The following overlooked metrics can help you gain important insights into the performance of your social media efforts.

Audience Growth Rate

Audience growth rate refers to the change in your audience size on a specific social media platform over time. This metric is helpful in understanding how well a specific post or an entire social media campaign is performing. You can determine how your efforts are impacting your growth rate by measuring the number of new followers you gained for a specific period of time immediately following your new social media activity. To turn this growth rate into a percentage, divide the number of new followers you gained by your total audience number and multiply by 100.

Traffic Drivers

As with email marketing, this is an important metric that will help you understand which of your social media platforms are sending the most viewers to your website. Knowing your leading social media traffic drivers will help you make informed decisions regarding which platforms to invest the most time and resources on when developing future social media campaigns.

Comments

When your organic social media posts or paid social ads receive a large number of comments, it’s a good indication that you’re doing a good job connecting with your audience. This can inform your approach to future posts and ads. By crafting new posts and ads that are similar in tone and content to the prior ones that received the most comments, you’re more likely to experience similar success.

Posts and ads with a lot of comments also provide an additional benefit. If you take the time to read through the comments, you can learn a lot about your audience, including:

• How the feel about your company and your products
• How they speak about your products and services
• Common themes that arise among your audience

These insights can be turned into actionable data that helps you more effectively connect with your audience in the future.

Webolutions Can Help You Grow Your Business

At Webolutions, we understand that a data-driven approach is necessary to ensure your marketing efforts achieve maximum impact. As part of our comprehensive digital marketing services, we’ll create a Performance Intelligence Roadmap™ that identifies the right metrics to track in order to accurately measure the performance of your campaign, allowing us to make adjustments over time that will maximize your marketing ROI.

We follow a meticulous process when developing your Performance Intelligence Roadmap™. It includes the following steps:

• Collaborating with your team to clearly define your marketing goals for the coming year
• Creating a model, based on industry numbers or your past performance (if available), that clearly defines your different marketing channels, the related contributions to leads/sales, and the key funnel data points you need for success in achieving your annual marketing goals
• Outlining the data points needed and ensure these data points are accessible from your existing systems
• Outlining what actionable information you need to see quickly and easily to understand your performance and make the adjustments necessary to improve this performance
• Developing the tracking systems or dashboards to aggregate the data into useful information
• Applying your performance intelligence solutions through active monitoring, smart reviews and adjustments to continuously improve your results

You’ll benefit from our Real-Time Performance Intelligence Dashboards™ which give you access to your most up-to-date data in graphical models that are easy to visualize and understand. This will allow you to see the critical information and trends associated with your marketing campaign.

With our proven method for gathering performance intelligence data, you’ll be able to grow your business smarter, faster and easier.

Contact us today to schedule a free consultation. Webolutions serves clients nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.

The post 12 Overlooked Marketing Metrics to Grow Your Business appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

Making Excuses Is Expensive

One of the biggest differences between those companies achieving average business success and those businesses who are continuously super successful is that the top performing businesses have established a routine or rhythm of doing the things necessary to drive their growth. The businesses who seem to struggle are more apt to simply make excuses.

Some of the excuses we hear from average performing company leaders include:

• They do not have time to create a plan for success.
• They do not know exactly what to include in their success plan.
• They do not know how to make their plan actionable.

This may seem somewhat blunt, but when we hear excuses like these for not creating an actionable plan for success in the new year, we know immediately that the organization is going to continue to struggle. If you do not create an organized plan, the odds of you achieving anything greater than average decreases dramatically.

Your Annual Planning Roadmap

In our recent blog post, “Annual Planning Roadmap – Your Guide to Greater Success“, we detailed our steps for successful annual planning. If you are not sure how to do annual planning or if you want to conduct more successful annual strategic planning, be sure to review this article.

Here is a summary of the key annual planning elements detailed in our previous article:

• Marketplace Insights & Clarity – Do you understand your market as well as any changes or shifts occurring within it?
• Clarity of Your Positioning – How do you compare to your competitors, and are you creating and communicating your true differentiation factors to your audience?
• Core Strengths Identification – What are you able to do that is truly better than others in your market, and are you effectively leveraging these strengths to achieve a competitive advantage?
• Strategic Decluttering – Do you have clarity on your specific goals and the strategies necessary to achieve them?
• Team Alignment – Is your team connected to, excited by, and engaged in your vision? Do your team’s individual success metrics align with your goals?
• Executable Key Success Measures – Do you know precisely what you need to measure to achieve your goals, and have you implemented the right performance intelligence systems to track your success?

The Results You Will Enjoy

Those companies who follow these steps enjoy many advantages and even a vast competitive advantage over those companies who do not. Some of these many benefits include:

• The ability to complete more impactful strategic projects which move the company forward.
• The ability to say no to new initiatives which may clutter their focus and take them off track.
• The ability to create a more aligned and connected team that performs at a far higher level.
• The ability to grow sales faster and enjoy a higher profit margin.

Preparing & Implementing for Success in 2023

Let’s take a step back and take a look at the characteristics and the routines followed by those companies who achieve amazing results.

They Establish a Success Discipline and Rhythm

Preparing and implementing for your annual business success is not something that just happens. You must dedicate time specifically for this by scheduling strategic time spaces. These spaces must allow enough time for understanding the available information, asking critical questions, introspective thinking, stakeholder collaboration, and truly fresh thinking.

Many companies scheduled these spaces at the beginning of each year to ensure that nothing can get in the way of them taking this time. They are not optional and cannot be cancelled. This attention to rhythm and discipline assures that this critical strategic preparation and implementation are given the full attention that they deserve.

A sample annual strategic rhythm may look something like this:

• Monthly exec team meetings to review performance and plan
  • A half or full day each month
• Quarterly exec team offsite meetings to take a deeper dive
  • One or two full days each quarter
• Fall annual planning offsite with research, evaluation & planning
  • 2 full days each year

Companies who do not have a plan often make the excuse that a rhythm like this would take way too much time. But highly successful companies who implement this type of rhythm and discipline and would all agree that without this time, there is no possible way to excel and achieve their lofty goals.

They Collect the Data Needed for Intelligent Insights

Highly successful companies do not rely on their feelings or individual bias for the development of their plan. They collect the necessary information for objective review and to determine the facts more accurately. As a matter of fact, it is far more beneficial to hope that you are surprised by the data than to assume that you already know everything. Each surprise you encounter teaches you something that you did not know. This makes you and your plan better and more competitive.

Some data that you may want to gather as part of your annual planning process could include:

• Team Insights
  • Your team member happiness, engagement, and dedication score.
  • Areas in which your team feels you excel.
  • Areas in which your team feels you need to improve.
  • Your team’s perception of your marketplace unique selling proposition.
• Client Insights
  • Your clients’ overall satisfaction score.
  • Areas in which your clients feel you excel.
  • Areas in which your clients feel you need to improve.
  • Your clients’ perception of your marketplace positioning.
• Organizational Insights
  • What are your sales closing rates by marketing channel?
  • What is your marketing ROI by marketing channel?
  • What products or services generate your best and worst profit margin?
  • What factors may impact your sales or margins in the coming year?
• Competitive Insights
  • How does your website rank on search engines compared to competitors?
  • How does your messaging compare to your competitors?
  • How do your offerings and pricing models compare to your competitors?
• Market Insights
  • Which of your products or services are growing in demand and which are declining?
  • What words is the market using to search for your products and services?
  • To what upcoming trends do you need to pay attention?

Every company is different with regard to what data might provide the critical insights for them to reach a greater level of success. As you practice your planning, you will continue to improve your knowledge of what critical data you need and the insights this approach will provide.

They Develop Their Plan

The first element of an effective success plan is setting specific goals. There is no right or wrong answer for how many years into the future that you should look when doing this. However, the fewest number of years forward that we have seen, as effective, is three years. Then, for each of the next three years, you should outline your key success measures. Some of these success measures might include:

• Annual Sales
• Profit Margin
• Client Retention Rates
• Sales By Product / Service Type
• Number of Team Members / Future Org Chart

The more specific and detailed your plan, the more successful you will be.

By using and understanding the right data and insights through an open-minded and curious review, you can create a plan with greater clarity and intention. When we work with our clients to help them develop their plan, we define the following key elements:

• Critical Areas of Focus
  • These are the overarching areas to which we must pay attention over the next two to three years if we are going to succeed in achieving our business goals. We list these and then prioritize them in order of importance.
• Mission Strategies
  • These are the consolidated areas of focus to which we must allocate attention and resources over the next two to three years that are most important to our business success.
• Annual Priorities
  • These are the specific areas of focus beneath our defined mission strategies for which we must create initiatives in order to ensure our most critical areas of focus are being addressed.
• SMARTs
  • These are the specific projects or initiatives we are going to complete on a quarter by quarter basis that ensure we are successfully moving our company forward to meet our long-term business goals. Every SMART must contain its own unique and quantifiable success measure(s).

They Establish the Right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

When you have developed a plan using the approach outlined above, you should have the knowledge necessary to identify the key performance measures which you need to ensure your success.

This list of possible KPIs can get overwhelming quickly. You can drown yourself in a sea of data. Our advice is to go ahead and make a complete list of all the data that you would like to track. Then, take a step back and start to prioritize your list by what will move your success meter the most. A good goal is to have an initial list of 10 or fewer (less is better) key business indicators that you need to track, based on your defined business goals.

Let’s look at an example. If your #1 annual priority is new client acquisition, the most important KPIs for you to track would include:

• # of new qualified leads per month
• Your new qualified lead closing rate

It is just that simple. If you are achieving your monthly goals for these two KPIs, you will achieve your new client acquisition goal for the year. So, if these KPIs are on track, you do not need to measure anything else for this initiative. Keep it simple.

They Implement the Necessary Tracking Systems

One of the biggest challenges we see with our clients is that they do not have the systems in place to accurately measure their most critical KPIs. Here is a little secret. NO business has the systems in place to accurately measure their most critical KPIs until they clearly define these KPIs and set up necessary systems to measure them.

This makes perfect sense, right? How would a company possibly have the system to accurately measure KPIs without first defining what these are? The first step is defining the KPIs, then identifying and creating the right systems to create accurate measurement. It is important to avoid getting distracted by what your current systems can measure. These may or may not be your most important KPIs. You cannot improve what you don’t measure.

Let’s go back to our example above. If you need to measure your # of new qualified leads per month, here is what you need to accurately measure this:

• A clear definition of what a “qualified lead” means to your organization
• A CRM system that allows you to mark new leads as “qualified” when these criteria are met
• Team training to ensure that all qualified leads are marked properly in your system
• A way to accurately pull a report (often or maybe in real time) of the number of qualified leads for a given month

For each of your identified KPIs, you must create this type of system. Once in place, you can focus on achieving the results needed.

They Engage & Align Their Team

The most successful companies engage their entire team in their plan. They outline the specific goals and the most critical KPIs. They tie everyone’s role responsibilities and the company projects/initiatives to these goals. Everyone understands how what they do each and every day fits into the overall plan. Everyone understands the value they create, why this is important to the overall team’s success and the impact that this creates for themselves, their team and their clients.

Some companies will even tie profit sharing and other goal-based perks to an individual team member’s performance and the overall company’s success.

If your team understands the vision of the company and that their specific role is critical, the performance of the entire organization elevates.

They Measure, Review & Adjust Often

Let’s say that I had a personal goal to lose 10 pounds this year. At what frequency of weighing myself on the scale would you say that I would have greatest chance of success?

• 1X – once at the end of the year
• 4X – one time each quarter
• 12X – one time each month
• 365X – once a day

Of course, the more frequently something is measured, the greater the odds of success.

The most successful companies have the systems to measure their most critical KPIs often. These measures may even generate reports in real time. This information needs to be readily available and viewable by everyone who is able to contribute to your results. If you need X qualified leads in a month to be successful, the number of new qualified leads should be reviewed on a daily basis. If not, your odds of achieving your goal diminish greatly.

The quote “What gets measured gets managed” rings true. Once you have created an effective rhythm for measuring and reviewing your most critical KPIs, that next step is to manage these outcomes to achieve your defined goals.

Let’s go back to our lead generation example. If you set a goal of 19 new qualified leads per month and you conduct business Monday–Friday, there are about 23 business days in a month. This means that to achieve your goal, you need to generate .83 new qualified leads per day. If you are 4 days into the new month, you should already have 3+ new qualified leads. If not, this situation needs managed.

Some examples of ways to manage these results to improve your KPIs could be to:

• Spend more money on advertising
• Get your current marketing to convert at a higher level
• Create a more compelling sales offer

As you measure, review and adjust to achieve your defined KPIs, you will excel as an organization.

FAQs – Preparing & Implementing for Greater Business Success in 2023

How can I prepare for greater business success in 2023?

The most important first step is to carve out the time necessary to establish a cohesive, actionable business plan that identifies the strategic initiatives you believe will lead to your desired growth goals. If you don’t already build time for annual planning into your success rhythm, start by setting up a series of meetings with your exec team to work through the items we discussed above.

What are the 4 basic elements of business success?

There are four essential elements that must exist for your business to become – and remain – successful:

• Strategic focus – Your management team must put in the time necessary for establishing business goals, planning the initiatives necessary to achieve these goals, and analyzing the data that will let you know whether your efforts are achieving their desired outcome.
• People – Your team is one of your most critical components to your success. Your staff must not only possess the skillset necessary to deliver high quality work, but they must also be aligned with your company culture and values, and be invested in the long term success of your business.
• Operations – You must establish and document the processes necessary for your team to be successful in their role.
• Marketing – In order to grow your business, you need a steady influx of qualified leads for your sales team to close. Therefore, your marketing efforts are critical to the success of your business.

What are the 3 ways to prepare for the future of business?

The only thing we know for sure about the future of business is that it won’t look like the present. The only constant in the business world is change. Therefore, the best way to prepare for the future of business is to place your company in the best possible position to capitalize on this change. The following three steps will help ensure you’re prepared:

• Recognize the value of adaptability – Failure to adapt to changing trends in your industry will make it virtually impossible to remain a market leader. A culture of adaptability is critical to your ongoing success as your industry evolves.
• Identify potential disruptors – Work with your team to generate a list of potential changes that may disrupt your industry in the next few years. Identify which of these will have the greatest impact on your business and then monitor these disruptors carefully so that you can become one of the first businesses to address them as they occur.
• Prepare a change plan – Make sure your team is prepared for how to handle the disruptions that change your industry. To do this, you must first understand how this change is impacting your business and your industry. Then, you must provide your team with the tools necessary to address these disruptions head on.

How do you run an annual planning process?

As we discussed earlier, we outlined this in detail in our recent blog post on annual planning. We recommend that you review it for additional insight on how to get this process rolling. For tips on how to develop an annual marketing plan that will drive more qualified leads, read the companion post on our blog.

Start Preparing & Implementing Today

Believe it or not, you are probably spending more time spinning your wheels and dedicating your resources to things that are not going to move you forward than the time you will spend putting the elements of this approach into practice. Change can be hard. But, once you start and get into this rhythm, you will begin to gain clarity into what is important. You will begin to focus on the activities, KPIs, and actions that will allow you to grow your company faster, smarter and easier.

The more you do this work, the better you will become at it. You will begin to create systems. You will gain a clearer understanding of what creates the most impact. You will develop reports and structures that make this easier and easier. As you implement these systems, your knowledge and understanding of them will grow along with your company. The key is to start! If all you do is set some goals, do some competitive research, develop your KPIs and start tracking, reviewing and managing against these on a daily basis, you will see amazing results.

About Webolutions

Webolutions is a full-spectrum management consulting and strategic growth implementation company. We help businesses across the country identify and effectively bring their unique stories to life, empowering them to scale faster, smarter, and easier.

Areas of expertise:

• Differentiating Brand Development
• Marketing & Communications Strategies
• Customer Journey Mapping & Execution
• Enterprise Website & Application Development
• Cross-Platform Data Systems Integration
• Organizational Development Strategies
• Team Alignment, Culture, & Performance Solutions
• Business Performance Intelligence Systems

A Special Offer

To speak with one of our experts about how you can implement these strategies for your company of at least $5 million in annual sales, call us at 303-300-2640 and request your Free 2023 Success Planning Consultation. During this 60-minute introduction, we’ll help you start creating a plan for success. You can also email any questions to info@webolutions.com.

The post Preparing & Implementing for Greater Business Success in 2023 appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

Business Strategy

Implementing a business intelligence strategy at your company is one of the most effective ways to grow your business smarter, faster and easier. The actionable insights you gain from this information can benefit just about every aspect of your operations. In the modern business world, the companies leveraging business intelligence have a significant leg up on their competitors who aren’t using this strategy.  

While it can be a daunting task to implement a BI strategy at your company, the efforts will be well worth the investment. You’ll gain clarity about a wide range of items, including changing trends, profitability improvements, your position within your market, and ways in which you can optimize your company’s performance. 

One of the things making this process overwhelming in the early stage of business intelligence adoption is the multitude of BI tools available. Determining the right solutions for the specific needs of your company will be crucial to your ability to truly harness the full capabilities of your business intelligence strategy. 

To help you better understand the top tools available to you, we recommend that you read the following article: 

Top BI Software, Applications & Platforms Reviewed 

This review was created by datapine, one of the leading business intelligence experts in the industry. Their team includes highly experienced data scientists, developers, academics and technological leaders who specialize in helping businesses gain actionable insights from the data they gather. 

While this information can help jumpstart your efforts, it can often be helpful to work with an experienced business intelligence partner. Webolutions has been implementing business intelligence strategies for our clients for years. Our team will listen carefully to your needs to recommend the best solutions to grow your business. Our Real-Time Intelligence Dashboards™ make it easy to interpret your data, giving you the insights and perspective necessary to make informed decisions that will help your company thrive. 

Free Business Intelligence Review

To speak with one of our consultants about developing true business intelligence for your company of at least $5 million in annual sales, contact us to request a free business intelligence review. During this 30-minute introduction, we work together to help you better understand this system, discuss your business goals, and start outlining your plan.

Contact Us

Key Takeaways from this Article 

Business intelligence tools are software platforms which gather, process and analyze large amounts of data to produce interactive reports that provide the actionable insights necessary to make more informed decisions impacting the success your business. These tools are highly visual, making it easier to identify trends in your data and your analytics.  

You have the ability to create a wide range of interactive dashboards which organize the information in the precise way you need it, providing up-to-date information and insights that can be used while this data is still fresh. In addition, these tools offer predictive analytics features which help you forecast upcoming trends. You can also create automated reports which are accessible to your entire team, making the process of identifying actionable items more efficient. 

Benefits of Business Intelligence Tools 

Business intelligence tools offer a wide range of benefits to both large and small companies. Regardless of the size and scope of your operations, BI tools allow you to effectively manage your data and organize it in a cohesive way that allows you to understand exactly what’s going on at your company. Some of the most important benefits you’ll experience include: 

• Organize all your data in one place – Most businesses use a variety of different tools to gather data. When this information is siloed in different places, it becomes more challenging to gain a comprehensive understanding of how different aspects of your operations are performing. Business intelligence tools will bring all of this data together in a centralized platform, making it easier to identify trends, issues and opportunities across your organization.
   
• Data is more accessible to all team members – The dashboards and automated reports generated by BI software tools are easily accessible to every member of your team, and very little training is required for individuals to leverage this valuable information. Because these BI reports and dashboards are easy to understand, even team members with novice data analysis skills will be able to leverage this information with relative ease.
   
• Predictions and business forecasting are much easier – Business intelligence tools make it much easier for your team to gain insights regarding future trends which may impact your business, market, and industry as a whole. This makes it much easier to take a proactive approach to these trends, ensuring you stay ahead of the curve.
   
• Manual tasks are eliminated – Without a powerful business intelligence tool, this data must be managed in numerous spreadsheets. Creating these spreadsheets can be time consuming and interpreting the data on them can be challenging for individuals who lack sophisticated analytics skills. The automated reports and dashboards generated by BI tools eliminates the time consuming process of creating spreadsheets and analyzing the data contained in them. In addition, you’ll easily be able to customize your dashboards to create powerful, interactive presentations that make it easy for others to understand the insights contained in the data.
   
• Business costs are reduced – Business intelligence solutions make data gathering, analysis and reporting much faster and more streamlined. This allows your team to work more efficiently and make adjustments that will boost profitability faster. In fact, a study conducted by BI Survey found that over 50% of companies using business intelligence solutions reported both a reduction in costs and an increase in revenue.
   
• Access this information anywhere, anytime – The top business intelligence tools utilize a cloud-based model, giving you access to your dashboards and reports whenever you need them. As long as you have internet connectivity, you can review your data on any device.

Best Business Intelligence Tools to Grow Your Business 

So which BI tools should you consider for your company? Ultimately, the right solution for you will depend on your specific needs. However, it’s still helpful to know some of the leading solutions – including what they can and can’t do – when you start evaluating options. 

This article conducted a thorough analysis of business intelligence tools to generate a list of the top 14 solutions on the market. Their process involved evaluating expert software comparisons and user reviews from two of the most prominent BI advisory and research companies – Capterra and G2Crowd. The list generated here includes the BI software platforms that achieved the best rankings on both websites. In order to be considered, the tool needed a minimum of 50 reviews between the two sites.  

The top 14 tools are listed below. For a comprehensive discussion of each solution’s key features and shortcomings, read the full article. 

• datapine
• SAS Business Intelligence
• Infor Burst
• SAP BusinessObjects
• Domo
• Oracle Business Intelligence
• Zoho Analytics
• MicroStrategy
• Dundas BI
• GoodData
• IBM Cognos Analytics
• QlikView
• Board
• Yellowfin BI

Using this Information to Determine the Right BI Solution for Your Company 

While all of the solutions listed above are highly rated and do an excellent job, not all of them will be right for your company. In order to truly leverage all of the competitive advantages provided by business intelligence, you’ll need to select the right tool(s) to address your specific needs. This requires doing a little bit of planning before you start evaluating your options: 

• Identify Your Goals for Your BI Efforts
  • Business intelligence can deliver actionable insights on a wide range of items impacting every aspect of your business – make a list of the important goals you want to focus on with your BI efforts
  • Keep your list to the most essential goals and metrics to move your company forward – focusing on too many items will make it harder to leverage these insights into truly actionable results
  • Look for BI tools that are most effective at providing insights associated with the specific goals you’re trying to achieve
     
• Identify the Data You Need
  • What types of data are needed to provide the insights you’re looking for?
  • Which teams are most involved in using this data?
  • Make sure these individuals are involved in assessing BI tools so that your solution will effectively address their needs
     
• What Types of Functionality Do You Need?
  • What reports and dashboards will you need to leverage your data most effectively?
  • How savvy is your team at evaluating this information? Do you need a solution that is accessible for individuals of all skill levels or a more sophisticated tool that requires extensive understanding of analytics?
  • Look for solutions which offer the specific functionality to address the needs of your team

Let Webolutions Help 

While the most advanced business intelligence tools can be easily used by your team, it will still require some skill and experience to set up your software and customize reports to the specific needs of your organization. If you have a team with the skill set to handle this, you’re all set. If not, it can be helpful to work with a third-party BI provider who can set your team up for success. Webolutions is here to help. 

At Webolutions, we have extensive experience implementing business intelligence solutions for businesses in a wide range of industries. We understand the sophisticated nuances of the leading tools in the market, and we can recommend the right solution for your specific needs. In addition, we have the ability to work with any software tools you currently use to make the process as easy as possible for your team. 

You’ll benefit from our Real-Time Intelligence Dashboards™, which provide you with the actionable insights you need in a format that is easy to understand. You’ll always receive the most current data, ensuring you can be proactive in your decision making. This will allow you to more effectively monitor changing trends as they develop. 

To speak with one of our consultants about developing true business intelligence for your company of at least $5 million in annual sales, call us at 303-300-2640 and request a Free Business Intelligence Review. During this 30-minute introduction, we work together to help you better understand this system, discuss your business goals, and start outlining your plan. You can also email any questions to info@webolutions.com.   

Webolutions is a full-spectrum business consulting and strategic implementation company. We help businesses across the country identify and effectively bring their unique story life, allowing them to scale faster, smarter and easier.  

Our specific areas of expertise include:  

• Differentiating Brand Development 
• Marketing & Communications Strategies
• Customer Journey Planning & Implementation 
• Enterprise Website & Application Development
• Systems Integration
• Organizational Development Strategies 
• Team Alignment & Performance Solutions 
• Business Performance Intelligence Systems 

The post 14 Best Business Intelligence Solutions to Help Your Company Grow appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

While these insights are essential for the growth of your business, it can be challenging to set up and implement the right business intelligence strategy to deliver the information you truly need. Therefore, it’s crucial to do your research before diving into the planning phase of the process. Make sure you truly understand what you need out of your BI solutions, and make sure you have a strong plan for how to set them up properly. 

We recommend reading the following article to gain a deeper insight into how to implement a BI strategy at your organization: 

Business Intelligence Implementation: A Step-by-Step Guide 

At Webolutions, we help our clients set up and manage their business intelligence solutions, providing Real-Time Intelligence Dashboards™ that give them the actionable insights their team needs to better understand the changing landscape of their industry. Our team will work with you to gain a clear picture of your specific goals for your BI solutions. Then, we’ll recommend the proper strategies and tools to deliver the information your business needs. 

Learn about The Top 10 Key Metrics to Measure Website Effectiveness

Key Takeaways from this Article 

A business intelligence strategy provides a framework for your team to make data-driven decisions on just about every aspect of your business. The insights you gain from your business intelligence efforts can then be leveraged to elevate the success of your business. 

Implementing a BI strategy at your company will offer a variety of benefits, including: 

• Real-time data tracking – Receive instant access to the important data needed to run your business more effectively. This allows you to be proactive in your decision making instead of finding out too late that an essential action needed to be taken.
   
• Data harmonization – Different departments in your company are most likely collecting different types of data. When viewed separately, you only receive a partial picture of what is going on. Business intelligence allows you to receive all of this data in one comprehensive report, making it easier to make informed, data-driven decisions that will positively impact your business.
   
• Improved efficiency – You’ll receive important insights that will help you understand how to address areas where employees are underperforming, redundant roles exist, and other organizational inefficiencies are negatively impacting performance. You’ll also be able to see the results of the actions you take to determine whether they’ve achieved their desired outcome or if additional adjustments to your strategy are required.
   
• Improved visibility – It can be easy to get lost in a sea of data. Business intelligence solutions allow you to more clearly see how this data is impacting every aspect of your organization.
   
• Actionable insights – You’ll be able to view historic data and compare it to the real-time data you’re gathering to better understand trends in your market, predict the success of potential strategies, and identify actions to take which may help you increase revenue and profitability moving forward.
   
• Deeper customer insights – You can use your BI efforts to more effectively understand the behaviors, preferences and purchasing patterns of your customers. This can help you provide better customer services and make improvements to your products that will resonate with your customers.
   
• Greater competitive advantage in your market – You have the ability to compare your metrics with those of your competitors to understand areas where you’re performing better than they are, and also ways in which you can learn from their actions to improve your performance. This knowledge can help you create a plan that will make you stand out from your competitors and resonate better with potential new customers.

Free Business Intelligence Review

To speak with one of our consultants about developing true business intelligence for your company of at least $5 million in annual sales, contact us to request a free business intelligence review. During this 30-minute introduction, we work together to help you better understand this system, discuss your business goals, and start outlining your plan.

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Steps to Take When Implementing a Business Intelligence Strategy at Your Company 

In order to maximize your BI efforts, it will require a significant amount of planning. Here are the steps necessary to construct an effective business intelligence strategy: 

• Create a roadmap for your BI strategy – This roadmap should be guided by the goals you’re trying to achieve. Once you’ve identified your goals, you can determine the data needed to guide the actions you take towards achieving these goals.
   
• Identify team members responsible for implementing your BI strategy – Business intelligence encompasses multiple aspects of your operations and therefore, it’s crucial that the team responsible for implementing your strategy includes individuals from all departments using this data.
   
• Define your KPIs – You’ll need to determine which key performance indicators (KPIs) are necessary to track to achieve the desired outcome from your business intelligence efforts.
   
• Choose your software tools – There are many BI software tools available. You’ll need to evaluate your options and identify the right tool(s) for the specific needs of your business. Hiring IT services Virginia Beach will help you choose the best tools for your business.
   
• Choose a data storage method – There are two options for storing the data used with your business intelligence tools: on-site servers or cloud-based solutions. In most instances, a cloud-based option will be a more effective approach.
   
• Synchronize your data – Often, each department will have their own unique way of gathering data, and they most likely will each utilize different sets of tools, approaches, and storage methods. In order to receive the holistic insights necessary for effective BI implementation, you’ll need to integrate all data in one place so that it can be evaluated in a broader context.
   
• Create a feedback loop – When creating your business intelligence strategy, schedule regular meetings with all team members involved in the process to monitor the status of the project and make any necessary adjustments to your plan.
   
• Roll out in stages – Rather than launching your entire BI strategy at once, start with just a few critical KPIs. This will allow you to evaluate the success of your strategy on a smaller scale and make any necessary adjustments before implementing your plan on a broader scale.

Getting Started – What You Need to Do Next 

If you’re planning on implementing your BI strategy on your own, here are the things you must do first to ensure you get the most out of your efforts: 

• Identify your objectives – some potential goals for your BI efforts may include:
  • Improve your internal workflow
  • Improve customer retention
  • Optimize your expenditures
  • Improve your ROI on your marketing efforts
  • And many more

Remember, less is more. The key is to narrow your objectives to the most important items that will move your business forward. If you focus on too many goals, your efforts will be too scattered to achieve meaningful results.
 

• Identify the data you need:
  • What are you already collecting? 
  • What do you need to start collecting?
  • What are the best methods of obtaining and storing this data?
  • Do you already have the solutions you need in place, or will you need to adopt new data gathering tools?
• Assemble your team:
  • Make sure all departments are represented on your BI team
  • Involve your team members in the planning process from the start to ensure they are fully invested and have input on what their department needs to get the most out of these efforts
     
• Narrow down your KPIs: 
  • As with your goals, less is more, so choose only the most critical items
     
• Compare software vendors:
  • Unless you have individuals on your team with the background necessary to evaluate BI software tools, you’ll need to work with a third-party vendor who can guide you to the right solutions for your specific needs
  • Make sure you choose a vendor with: 
    • Experience working with businesses in your industry
    • Specialized knowledge of BI software solutions

Once you’ve taken these steps, you’ll be well on your way to implementing a business intelligence strategy that will elevate the success of your company. 

Let Webolutions Help 

As you can see, there is a lot involved in implementing a new business intelligence strategy at your company. In many instances, working with a third-party BI provider can streamline the process and ensure you are set up for success every step of the way. At Webolutions, we’re here to guide you through this process. Our team can help you implement your BI solution, and our Real-Time Intelligence Dashboards™ will deliver the actionable insights you need, providing you with up-to-date information at all times. 

To speak with one of our consultants about developing true business intelligence for your company of at least $5 million in annual sales, call us at 303-300-2640 and request a Free Business Intelligence Review. During this 30-minute introduction, we work together to help you better understand this system, discuss your business goals, and start outlining your plan. You can also email any questions to info@webolutions.com.   

Webolutions is a full-spectrum business consulting and strategic implementation company. We help businesses across the country identify and effectively bring their unique story life, allowing them to scale faster, smarter and easier.  

Our specific areas of expertise include:  

• Differentiating Brand Development 
• Marketing & Communications Strategies
• Customer Journey Planning & Implementation 
• Enterprise Website & Application Development
• Systems Integration
• Organizational Development Strategies 
• Team Alignment & Performance Solutions
• Business Performance Intelligence Systems  

The post Set Your Company Up for Success – Implement Effective Business Intelligence appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

Understanding business intelligence solutions and identifying the best options for your specific needs can be overwhelming. Before committing to a specific strategy, it’s important to become more familiar with what business intelligence is and what it can accomplish.

You must pair your business with a credit card machine in order to take it to the next level. A card reader offers flexibility and convenience for accepting payments.

While subsequent articles will provide a deeper dive into business intelligence, we feel that it’s important to start with an overview to ensure you have the proper context to understand the specific nuances that we’ll discuss later this month. We recommend that you read the following article to gain a deeper insight into how business intelligence can benefit your business:

The Role of Business Intelligence: What It Is and Why It Matters

Webolutions can provide the guidance you need to ensure your business intelligence efforts are successful. Our team has extensive experience setting up and managing business intelligence strategies for companies in a wide range of industries. We’ll work closely with your team to understand your specific needs and goals. We’ll then set up all proper data pipelines and identify the ideal BI solution for your business. In addition, our Real-Time Performance Intelligence™ models provide the insightful, actionable information you need in an easy to process manner that helps you better understand critical information and trends.

Free Business Intelligence Review

To speak with one of our consultants about developing true business intelligence for your company of at least $5 million in annual sales, contact us to request a free business intelligence review. During this 30-minute introduction, we work together to help you better understand this system, discuss your business goals, and start outlining your plan.

Contact Us

See our article on Top Website Success Metrics

Key Takeaways from this Article

Business intelligence (BI) is an umbrella term that encompasses the ways in which you collect, store, analyze and report data generated by your operations to make more informed decisions moving forward. This ensures that your decisions are guided by comprehensive data which tells a complete picture, rather than isolated anecdotal evidence or gut instincts. When your actions are grounded in data-driven insights, you’re much more likely to make choices that will achieve your goals.

When you’ve implemented a strong BI strategy at your company, you’ll have highly accurate, comprehensive and organized data that can help you make informed decisions in just about any aspect of your business. These tools can be used by just about every team at your company. Common uses of BI include:

• Measuring the performance of your KPIs and other metrics against benchmarks and goals you’ve established
• Visualizing the volume of website traffic over time
• Evaluating the performance of your marketing efforts
• Tracking potential customers as they move through your sales funnel
• Segmenting users by demographic characteristics
• Creating reports to be used by your executives and team members for planning and decision making

While business intelligence traditionally required an in-house team of data analysts, there are a wide range of self-service BI solutions available today. Self-service BI allows everyone on your team to access and analyze your data without the need for a specialized data analysis background. These tools make business intelligence more accessible to your entire team, and it frees up your data analysts to perform more advanced tasks.

When evaluating BI solutions for your business, make sure to consider the following:

• Connections to data sources – You need to ensure your BI tool can integrate with your other solutions used for data storage and can access the most up-to-date data at all times.
• Data querying – Your BI tool should be able to make it easy to connect queries from different data sources and combine them into a new aggregate source for additional insights.
• Data visualization and dashboards – Make sure your BI tool can deliver information in a variety of chart types, and ideally provides some level of customization for your charts. Your tool should also be able to create dashboards which track all of your charts and key business metrics in one location.
• Data analysis – Your BI tool should have the ability to provide a variety of descriptive and diagnostic analysis, and you should be able to modify your queries to gain deeper insights.
• Data availability – Make sure your BI tool allows you to easily add new users and provides different levels of permissions for different stakeholders.
• Deployment method – In general, cloud-based BI solutions provide more benefits than on-premises server-based solutions.
• Application support – There will be a learning curve for any BI solution your company adopts. Make sure to evaluate the support resources provided by the tool to help get your team up to speed as fast as possible.

Putting this Information into Practice

Before implementing a BI strategy at your company, you’ll need to do some planning:

• Make sure the tools you’re considering can provide the solutions you need
  • Outline how you expect to use your BI tools at your company
  • Identify the top priorities in what you need from a business intelligence solution
  • Rank BI tool features so that you can understand what is most important when assessing the tradeoffs you’ll have to make when choosing between different options
• Establish an effective data pipeline
  • You need a functioning data pipeline to collect and store the information your BI solution will analyze
  • Make sure your data is organized properly before you engage in any analysis
  • All team members who manage data will need to be aligned regarding the needs of your users to ensure your analysis delivers actionable insights
• Educate your team
  • Adopting new business intelligence tools can often be daunting for your team, and proper education is crucial to the success of your efforts
  • Education will not only facilitate faster adoption, but ensure your team members are gaining accurate insights from the data being analyzed
  • Identify a team member to spearhead the implementation of your new BI strategy, and empower this person to provide the rest of your team with the tools and knowledge necessary to leverage your new system to its fullest

Let Webolutions Help

It’s understandable if you find the ins and outs of business intelligence to be a bit overwhelming. It’s a complex, multifaceted strategy that when leveraged correctly, can help your business thrive. But when not implemented properly, your business intelligence strategy may fail to yield the results your company needs.

To speak with one of our consultants about developing true business intelligence for your company of at least $5 million in annual sales, call us at 303-300-2640 and request a Free Business Intelligence Review. During this 30-minute introduction, we work together to help you better understand this system, discuss your business goals, and start outlining your plan. You can also email any questions to info@webolutions.com.

Webolutions is a full-spectrum business consulting and strategic implementation company. We help businesses across the country identify and effectively bring their unique story life, allowing them to scale faster, smarter and easier.

Our specific areas of expertise include:

• Differentiating Brand Development
• Marketing & Communications Strategies
• Customer Journey Planning & Implementation
• Enterprise Website & Application Development
• Systems Integration
• Organizational Development Strategies
• Team Alignment & Performance Solutions
• Business Performance Intelligence Systems

The post Creating an Effective Business Intelligence Strategy to Elevate the Success of Your Business appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.