Business Intelligence for Small Business

Business Intelligence has become one of those terms that reaks of consulting-ease, but in it’s truest form, business intelligence (BI) is as genuinely necessary for growing a businesses of any size as anything other than cash flow can be.

Business Intelligence is the process by which we gather meaningful, raw information about our business and make sense of it through well thought out analysis and defined analytics. More simply put, BI is the process of putting the puzzle pieces together so you can see the real picture. For example, it’s great to know how many visitors you have to your web site but it’s also essentially useless unless you also know things like:

where they came from (google, direct, a link on someones site, …)
what keywords drove them to your site
when they came
what they did when they were there
what place in the purchase process they are dropping off
etc…

Once we define the analytics that are important to us and gather a meaningful amount of raw data we can begin to draw a picture of our visitors/customers and their behaviors that will help us make decisions about how to better target our efforts to them, make our site easier to use, buy things from and generally provide a positive user experience.

The intent is of course to drive more traffic and more sales as measured in visits and conversions respectively. The difference between where you are now and where you will be when you start mining and making sense of your data can be enormous. But even if the difference is smaller than you would like, it is still likely to be enough to give you an edge over your competitors who don’t leverage BI.

Effective use of Business Intelligence is also an important tool for small businesses who want to grow beyond small and into medium and eventually large status. Besides the raw analytics and data you will collect over time, the process of BI may also help you stay focused on what is working for you and helping you grow, an important consideration since so many businesses start to loose their way or try to be all things to all people as they grow which is typically a huge mistake.

Consider very carefully the intelligence you can derive from your business and if you’re not sure where to start, contact me if you would like help getting started. We’ll look at your business wholistically to make sure we consider as many relevant areas as possible. Your website is a great place to start but there is a lot of info that can also be derived from your daily operations and interactions as well.

Watch the data and get smarter!