Let's Talk Organic
Data-Driven Decision-Making (DDDM)
Every business has goals, targets, margins, quarterlies, statistics, objectives – a list that goes on and a cycle that repeats weekly, monthly, yearly.
What informs these goals? What do we base our targets on? How will we measure our growth? The answer is as simple as it is multifaceted and complicated, and the answer is data!
Lucky for business owners, the world as we know it is driven by data. So, it’s about time businesses start asking themselves why they aren’t basing their decisions on all data available to them?
So, what is it?
‘Data Driven Decision Making’ refers to businesses making strategic decisions based on data, facts, insights and metrics that align with their goals and objectives. In essence, it refers to businesses making informed decisions.
Where do we get the data?
The data referred to, data relevant to businesses’ decision making, refer to various data-sources. These can include but is not limited to Return on Investments (ROIs), profit margins, increase in sales and productivity growth. All of that will depend on the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) of a business. You know, the money stuff!
Here’s the game changer – social media analytics and data.
Times have changed and it’s crucial that businesses utilise all tools available to them, to take it to the next level.
Here’s a summarised guide on how to use social media insights from various platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and Google Ads (this is however a non-exhaustive list) to make data-driven decisions:
- Access Insights and Analytics Tools: Each social media platform provides its own set of insights and analytics tools. Access these tools within the respective platforms’ business or advertising interfaces. We love using our AdaptCRM system that summarises all the important data, and we also use other tools that are amazing at finding key insights!
- Identify Key Metrics: Determine which metrics are most relevant to your business goals. These may include reach, engagement, click-through rates, conversions, demographic data, and more. Align these with your business KPIs – in simpler terms, ask yourself “what do we want to get from our online presence?”.
- Analyse Audience Behaviour: Use platform insights to understand your audience’s behaviour, preferences, and demographics. Find trends, peak engagement times, and content preferences to tailor your strategy accordingly. If you know what makes them click, you’ll know what makes them tick!
- Evaluate Content Performance: Analyse the performance of your content across platforms. Identify which types of content (e.g., images, videos, articles) resonate most with your audience and drive the highest engagement and conversions. This ensures that the content that goes out is on point and no one in your social team is wasting time!
- Assess Ad Campaign Effectiveness: For platforms like Facebook and Instagram, analyse the performance of your advertising campaigns. Evaluate metrics such as ad reach, click-through rates, conversion rates, and return on ad spend (ROAS) to perfect your ad targeting and messaging. If you have a website that you want to get some traction on, and you have done your market research and you know your ideal client-crowd likes to use Google to find businesses or services like yours, we strongly recommend a committed monthly budget to Google Ads in addition to any other ad-spending to drive traffic to your website, and be sure to look at those stats!
- Segment and Target Audiences: Use demographic and behavioural data from platform insights to segment your audience effectively. ‘Anyone can be a customer’ is not always the best approach as it is a very traditional thought process and won’t always be your best bet when setting your online target audience. The more targeted, the better the results!
- Track and Measure ROI: Use platform insights to track the ROI of your social media efforts. Measure the impact of your campaigns on key business objectives such as website traffic, lead generation, sales, and customer acquisition costs. At the end of the day, whatever you are spending for your business, should be worth it and should be generating more business!
- Iterate and Refine: Continuously review and analyse social media insights to inform future decision-making. Iterate on your strategy based on performance data, experiment with new tactics, and refine your approach to maximize results over time.
By using social media insights businesses can make informed, data-driven decisions that optimise their social media strategy, improve engagement, and drive meaningful business outcomes – an insight to consider going forward!
If this is something that caught your attention and made you think about your own businesses approach, but you are unsure where to start, reach out below and let’s chat about how we can help you and your business adapt and thrive!