Your business can enhance your competitiveness by building up advantages in capabilities, processes, technology and market knowledge. As your industry or sectors matures, each company’s areas of competitive advantage can become narrower and more refined. So how to do stay ahead and win? Analytics & Google can give you that edge.
Analytics is about using statistics and the hard analysis of numbers to create business models that can explain and predict customer behavior and company operations. The use of such systems to generate models that delves into data to find problems and set trigger-sensitive alerts is not new. However, companies now need to find innovative ways to harness their vast amounts of data to gain competitive advantages. It is time to start using statistical analysis to map patterns of consumer activity, rather than intuiting it from what they think customers are doing. Conduct trend analysis by forecasting and extrapolating, based on varied assumptions. Predictive modeling will allow you to anticipate needed inventory, financing, capacity and much else, so they can provide better service at lower costs. Companies can gain powerful advantages if they optimize their analytical models to reflect these probable futures needs as closely as possible.
How do you start?
Your company can become true analytic competitors by climbing through five stages of a pyramid, starting from
- Analytically Impaired at the bottom and rising through
- Localized Analytics followed by
- Analytical Aspirations under
- Analytical Companies with
- Analytical Competitors at the top.
To construct the right plans, first determine where you are on this scale. Companies at stage 1 make no use of metrics at all in their decision-making process; stage 2 organizations use them in a limited way, perhaps in one or two areas; companies at stage 3 have begun to look for a more integrated process; organizations at stage 4 take an enterprise-wide perspective where analytics are an important tool; and stage 5 companies use analytics as their “primary driver of performance and value.”
Now how do you win?
Exploit a competitive advantage as fully as you can and as soon as you can, because competitors will usually notice and find a way to undermine your gain. Whatever data you use to gain a competitive edge with analytics, it is crucial that your “analytical capabilities” are:
1. Hard to duplicat – Base your analytics on a capacity that your competitorswould find difficult to duplicate. You may be able to exploit an area of your market that you understand best and can analyze more profitably.
2. Unique – Use analytics to support an aspect of your business process that is unique to your company. Do you specialize in a certain market segment or geographic base?
3. Adaptable to many situations – Use analytics for all aspects of your operation. Move across internal company boundaries and use the processes to improve other areas of your business.
4. Better than the competition – Excellent execution is essential. If you can be smarter, faster and more thorough than your competition, you will reap advantages.
5. Renewable – Keep refreshing and renewing your analytics and metrics. Even if your competitors target the same segment, by then you will have captured the market and moved on to something else.
So for marketing… Start with Google Analytics
Google Analytics not only lets you measure sales and conversions, but also gives you fresh insights into how visitors use your site, how they arrived on your site, and how you can keep them coming back… Competition Advantage And if you need more reasons here are 9 reasons why to use Google Analytics
- FREE to use
- Relatively easy basic setup
- Powerful customizable reports
- Great way of tracking marketing campaigns
- Send reports periodically via email
- Exports to Excel
- Setup Custom Alerts
- Powerful real time reporting
- Monitor your mobile and tablet traffic
