Data Is the Future: Here’s What You Need to Know About Building an Effective Data Strategy *)

With the rise of big data and an increasing number of datasets being made accessible thanks to the open data initiative, companies have more information than ever before at their fingertips. In order to get the most out of it, it’s vital to view data as an asset, and to ensure your company has a solid strategy in place to determine exactly how it should be sourced, stored, and managed.

Not sure where to start? Here are the steps you should be taking to build the most effective data strategy to keep up with your rivals.
Importance of Having a Data Strategy
Data is no longer just the result of all of your business activities; it’s an essential component that allows you to make better decisions and drive more conversions. A data strategy should have the aim of setting clear goals and ensuring that data can be shared easily throughout the organisation in a way that is repeatable for all future projects.

The main benefits of having a data strategy in place are:

Better personalisation – Using data more effectively will give you a much deeper understanding go your target audience, and therefore allow you to target them with content that is much more likely to engage.
Creates a culture – Having a strategy in place encourages a culture where data is seen as an asset and decisions are based on data.
Easier to scale up – Having a well crafted and considered strategy in place will make it easier to alter the tools and techniques you need as your business continues to grow and evolve.
Deal with data silos – Without having a well developed strategy in place it’s very unlikely you’ll be able to break down the data silos that have been built up across your organisation, and this will mean you have large chunks of information unable to be shared between departments.

Steps to Create an Effective Data Strategy
While your strategy will need altering as you grow your business, here are the main steps you need to take in order to get set up.
Put Someone in Charge
This may seem somewhat obvious, but it’s so important to have a single person who is responsible for the data in your organisation. This person will design the strategy and determine how data is to be collected, stored and used.

This will not only ensure that there is someone keeping track of the bigger picture instead of lots of small teams doing different tasks, but the rest of your employees will know who to go to for any data-related queries and won’t be given different responses each time.
Establish Goals
In order to be able to even think about putting a strategy together, you first need to determine what your end goals are. For example, this could be to increase web traffic, make your business more efficient, expand into a new market or increase revenue. Whatever your aims are, you should make them as specific as possible in order to establish exactly how they can be achieved.

For example, if you’re looking to expand your business and reach out to the Spanish paper industry, you’d first need to look at what research you need to do in order to determine how viable it would be e.g. how much demand there is for your product or service and how saturated the market is, then look at market insights to establish the best way to engage with potential customers.
Look at Your Current Infrastructure
In order to make all of your data-related activities more efficient, you may need to make changes to your current infrastructure. For example, your company’s historical data might be stored in older systems that are incapable of being used for more advanced analytics purposes, or you may have data silos that are preventing useful insights being shared across the whole organisation.

This may seem like a lot of work to put right, but with big data becoming more prevalent it’s important to ensure your system is fully functional and as efficient as possible now, or you’ll run into problems further down the line, as well as losing out to your more technologically advanced rivals.
Vary Your Sources
In order to ensure your strategy is based on quality and complete data, you should aim to use several different sources, both your own datasets and those from third-party sources. If you’re in B2B, a reputable business intelligence provider can be very useful here, such as Global Database. The platform offers comprehensive insights on millions of companies including everything from detailed financials and credit scores to number of employees and technologies used.

As well as drawing from different sources, it’s also a good idea to use a mixture of both qualitative and quantitative data in order to make sure your strategy is well-rounded. The two can be defined as follows:

Quantitative – Anything numerical; cold hard statistics and facts.

Qualitative – Unstructured data such as opinions or ideas.

 
Make Sure It’s Understood
It’s one thing having a team of analysts create a set of insights through the data available, but then getting the point across to the rest of the team can be another challenge altogether. Obviously it’s important that everyone knows what the data is referring to and what it means for the business, so it’s a very good idea to present these insights in a more user-friendly way, for example in charts or in meetings where everything is explained directly and any clarifications can be addressed.
Ensure Privacy and Protection
With more data available than ever before, it’s essential to ensure that your business has the necessary tools and systems in place to protect your customers’ data. Not only is this important ethically, but you also need to make sure that you’re fully compliant with data laws and regulations, including those that are newly introduced such as the EU’s GDPR.

Your strategy needs to be agile enough to adopt any changes in data policy, and you also need to ensure you’re staying up to date with impending changes so that you have enough time to make any adaptations.

Designing and implementing a data strategy can seem like a lot of hard work, but it is essential. With so much data being used and created every day, companies without a clear plan of action in place are likely to struggle to handle it efficiently and will experience negative impacts further down the line as their business grows and their data needs become more complex.

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