‘Stop! If you’ve been trying to move to Canada and you still have not moved over yet, you’ve been doing it the absolute wrong way’. Sound familiar?

Abeg, no stone me o!

Now, that’s a quick example of how data affects modern advertising. You may ask, ‘but I did not actively ask for Japa assistance on YouTube’. Yes; you might not have done that but someone sent you one video or perhaps, you just stumbled on another, watched it and the next thing, that’s all your feed cares about.

Let’s now head over to the ‘people who bought this, bought that’ factor. Who asked you? Lol; that is data for you and sometimes, the suggestions are even around specific pieces of information like your location, search history, liked posts, and even frequently watched movies. This is how Netflix can show you ‘Trending in Nigeria’ because at least, you still dey watch from Naija, without VPN.

It’s important that as a small business or even an established one, you know how this works because this goes a long way to determine what your sales story would look like. I’ll give you an instance.

At the beginning of the year, I made a list of perfumes I wished to try out and from January 26th, I bought one perfume each month from a particular store on Instagram but in April, I skipped a purchase. What do you think happened? I received a call from the vendor, telling how they missed me and decided to check in, to know how I was doing.

I felt special and immediately made an inquiry about a body mist because there was no money on ground for perfume and about a week later, I placed an order. It was not Angel Michael that revealed this to them; it was the data they had gathered about my purchase history and pattern that informed their decision to put a call through.

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Every business, be it that small stall on your street, your hairdresser, or your fave online store generates data. Whether it’s customers’ phone numbers, email addresses, customer’s car colour or physical features. All na data and they are very important pieces of information that differentiate growing businesses from stagnant ones.

I’ll do you one better by better explaining the need for data gathering and implementation with this painful experience.

Dorothy started her mini-importation business, which ran solely online. Most of her orders came from Lekki, Lagos but she decided to rent a physical store. To save cost, she chose one at Ikorodu instead, as a ‘sharp girl’. Now, delivery time, which usually was within 2 hours is now between 24 to 96 hours. Customers are complaining and reduced patronage has set in, all because she disregarded what her business data said.

This is the fate of so many small businesses and we don’t need to go any further to explain. Data is not this huge phenomenon; it’s something as simple as what you observe about your customers and what you do with the knowledge you have about them. ou can start with your Microsoft Excel worksheet or a notebook to write down every piece of information a customer shares with you.

But then, there is data analysis. Let’s sha leave that tori for another day.

Don’t forget; THE REWARD IS IN THE DOING.

Hope this helps your business.