Articles Tagged with: data
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July 23, 2019

3 Steps a Startup Must Take

So you have this great idea and it could potentially bring you a ton of profit. You know exactly what the product or service will be, you know how you want to brand it and you’re excited to get this started. 

Take a breath. 

There are a couple of things that every business should first go through to establish reliability and credibility. Let’s touch on them together. 

1. Create a website

We live in a digital age. Whether it’s super simple or overloaded with pages, you should absolutely have a website for your business. It should lead your users to a means of contacting you or purchasing a product/service. It might even have links to the business’s social media page, which is also very important. Once it’s up and running, you can find helpful tips for your next steps in our previous articles about driving traffic to your site and the power of data.

2. Create a custom email address

Picture this: you are on Xy Web Solution’s website and you decide to send them a message. Two days later, you get an email back from sexygal12345@gmail.com responding to that message. Personally, I would be afraid to even click on the email. 

Hopefully, your email address is not in sexygal’s realm. That said, it should not be johnsmith88@yahoo.com, either. A better solution is to create a custom email domain for your business. An email address like sales@xywebsolutions.com would invoke more credibility than the prior two. If you have your domain already and you want to get started we like recommending Google’s G Suite product.

NOTE: Gratuitous plug … use our contact form to ask for a G Suite promotional code and receive 20% off your first year.

3. Claim your business on Google

Head on over to https://www.google.com/business/. There, you will be asked about your business name, location and industry. You can choose whether or not to add a location, which would then appear on Google Maps. Once you go through all the steps, you will be redirected to your Google Business dashboard, where you can do all sorts of nifty things. 

June 10, 2019

How Data Can Save Your Business

A World of Data

My friend, you should have clicked on this link ages ago. Running a company in today’s day without analyzing incoming data goes hand in hand with gambling in the deepest corners of Caesars Palace in Vegas.

While there are experienced owners that intuitively feel where their market is going, it is difficult for them to have a hunch about exactly where their website traffic is coming from, or what age group buyers belong to. A failed startup owner confesses:

“We didn’t spend enough time talking with customers and were rolling out features that I thought were great, but we didn’t gather enough input from clients. We didn’t realize it until it was too late” (“The Top 20 Reasons”).

What Can Data Do For You?

Leveraging data analysis tools can answer questions like: “What do my returning buyers have in common?”, “What keywords lead the most clients to my site?” or “What is my profit in terms of each product?”. The same software can generate graphs that visually explain business metrics like  your average order value, gross profit over time and any key performance indicators that you have set for your business. These annual, seasonal or even daily reports can take your hand and slowly lead you out of the casino and into broad daylight.

Analyzing data can lead you toward pushing advertisements in one area more than another, or designing a new product based on your current buyers’ preferences. With informed decisions like these, you can really only increase profit and take your business to the next level.  A couple of months into the process, you might even find it easier to fall asleep knowing that you have a more stable way of supporting your family.

If you are wondering whether or not you have been asking yourself the right questions, follow the link to our survey: “How Data Savvy Is Your Business?”. Let’s see how deep into the casino you really are.

References:

“The Top 20 Reasons Startups Fail.” CB Insights Research, 15 Mar. 2019, www.cbinsights.com/research/startup-failure-reasons-top/.