Three Simple Places for SMBs To Get Started With Analytics

Although businesses at the enterprise scale have long used data to power vast analytics operations, a significant number of small businesses still aren't doing so. And of those that are, many only use analytics insofar as it exists within SaaS platforms they happen to subscribe to. According to SCORE, only 45% of small businesses even use analytics to track and improve their marketing performance. It's a situation that all but guarantees that SMBs are leaving huge sums of money on the table due to wasted opportunities and suboptimal spending that wouldn't have happened if they had fully embraced data analytics.

The good news is that SMBs don't need to radically reorganize their operations or plow significant sums of money into an analytics operation to correct the problem. They can start with data they already have or by targeting specific data analytics functions that don't require on-staff data experts. Here are the three best places for them to start.

Customer Communication Analytics

If there's one area where SMBs have the most to gain from analytics, it's within their customer service operations. One of the key things that holds many SMBs back, however, is the fact that they still rely on phone calls as their main customer communications channel. As it turns out, it's amazingly easy to collect data about phone-based communications and use it to improve your customer service.

To do it, SMBs need only switch to a cloud-based phone system with voice analytics capabilities built in. Such systems make it easy to spot common customer pain points and develop predetermined solutions to them. Plus, they help SMBs track and improve the performance of customer service reps. They also offer call recording functionality to allow managers a way to audit performance and zero in on the customer service tactics that work best.

Marketing Performance Analytics

As previously mentioned, plenty of SMBs still don't bother using marketing data analytics to guide their campaigns. And given that digital channels make up about 56% of the average business's marketing spend, that's a risky decision. Especially when you consider that digital marketing is by far the business activity that's most compatible with analytics. Plus, virtually every digital marketing tool and platform includes data collection and analytics functionality.

For starters, any SMB can use the Google Analytics platform to track and fine-tune their website's performance. It can also integrate with a variety of digital marketing efforts, including marketing emails, digital advertising, and more. The result is an all-in-one dashboard that gives an SMB total transparency into its digital marketing efforts. They can see what's working and what isn't and experiment to improve performance. Google even offers free online courses that will help just about anyone learn enough to hit the ground running with the platform.

Social Media Analytics

At last count, approximately 93% of US SMBs had a presence on Facebook. Almost as many use platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter). Some use these social media sites purely for marketing purposes, but most also use them as a way to connect with customers, disseminate important company information, and otherwise keep their brand recognition high. But whatever the principal use, there's no excuse for any business to forego using social media analytics to make the best use of all of their online efforts there.

This is especially true when you consider that there are more social media analytics tools than there are almost any other kind of analytics tool. SMBs can use them to achieve a variety of aims, including tracking brand engagement, analyzing customer sentiment, identifying product opportunities, and more. What's more, social media analytics features a remarkable ROI, with some 85% of businesses using some form of it seeing direct monetary gains because of it.

Off and Running

By using nothing but the three types of data and analytics mentioned above, any SMB can start to see substantial benefits in no time. Plus, most, if not all of them, can be started with little to no upfront investment besides the time it takes to learn to use a few tools and platforms. In light of that, it would seem that any SMB that doesn't immediately start exploring its analytics options would rather let its competition gain a potentially insurmountable advantage over it—and you wouldn't need analytics to spot the folly of that choice.