Consumers are spending more of their budgets online than ever before. We all know that good, solid data is the key component to growing a business. Data isn’t just a way to analyze traffic and monitor statistics, it’s a useful way to react to growth potential when the opportunity arises. Data makes us more successful, and without it, it can be destructive to your business.
Analyzing data over time is valuable, but we’re living in an age where we need to stay on top of trends, make decisions, and make them fast. With advances in technology and AI, real-time data has become a key contender to brand growth and one of the most important facets of any type of business. There’s been a shift in consuming data, and we can now gain critical insights wherever and whenever we want.
1. Monitoring Consumer Behavior
For years businesses have used analytics to understand marketing trends. We’ve all heard the lecture on the importance of understanding our target audience, their behavior, and their preferences. It’s common to focus on things like age, gender, location, things that help build buyer personas, and information we’ve been able to collect over time.
Real-time data has flipped the script when it comes to truly understanding buyers. 73% of consumers reported that they prefer to do business with brands that use their information to customize the shopping experience. With conversational marketing tools like chatbots or digital assistants, we can collect actionable insights in real time unlike ever before. We can understand how each individual customer travels through the purchase journey. We know their wants, their needs, and their pain points. With this information, we can truly humanize the customer experience and cater to each individual buyer.
2. Uncover Product Insights Faster
It’s easier than ever for businesses to comprehend how well a new product or existing products are received by consumers. We can gather reviews online or gain feedback from social media, but that alone isn’t nearly enough information to understand how products are truly performing. In order to make strategic business decisions, real-time data is essential. Product trends can need to be measured over days or hours instead of just weeks or months. Insights given in real-time will unveil unidentified gaps in your product selection, so you can offer your customers only the best.
3. Catching Website Performance Issues
Time is not on our side. Detecting issues and bugs within your website can be critical to your customer journey. If something goes wrong on your website, there’s only so much time before the dreaded destruction starts. Real-time data is our defense against retention drops, quick abandonment, and crashed sessions. By integrating a real-time data analytics tool, such complications can easily be avoided.