This post is part of a series of articles about presenting and interpreting statistics for business and marketing. The previous post in the series was “Stats entertainment: working with percentages“

What is a KPI dashboard?

KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator, and KPIs comprise whatever data you consider to be useful in measuring business performance, for example sales figures, marketing spend or any other aspect of your business or your industry that you care to measure.

A KPI dashboard is a place where you can keep this data so that you can refer back to it whenever you need to compare one set of data to another. Continue reading “Stats entertainment: creating a KPI dashboard” »

This post is part of a series of articles about presenting and interpreting statistics for business and marketing. The previous post in the series was “Stats entertainment: how not to get into a jam with your reporting“.

Relax: it’s not as scary as it seems

The thought of working with percentages can be daunting if you don’t already know the very simple formulae involved; in fact, writing this post has reminded me of the tears and tantrums we had to endure when my daughter was sitting GCSE maths (a horrible time in all our lives, and thank goodness that’s all over).

When you’re running a business or are involved in sales or marketing, percentages are something you’re not going to be able to avoid, and you’re going to have to bite the bullet and learn how to work with them. But let me reassure you: once you know how, you’ll wonder what you were ever worried about. Seriously. Percentages are easy-peasy to work out with a calculator, so you don’t even have to be any good at maths (I’ve been a total maths dunce all my life, but I can do percentages with my eyes shut, as long as I’ve got a calculator). Continue reading “Stats entertainment: working with percentages” »

It’s been said that in business, failing to plan is planning to fail.

I’m not sure anyone deliberately sets out to plan their company’s failure, but not knowing a bit about your marketplace before you launch a business or a new product/service is certainly going to hinder you.

You’ll need to know, for example, whether the market’s ready for what you’re selling; is there existing demand, or are you going to have to work hard to create it? And if a product or service like yours has already been brought to market by someone else, how can you make sure customers buy it from you, rather than from your competitors? Continue reading “Forward planning: analysing competitors” »

Marketing… it’s a funny old game.  It’s probably one of the most mistrusted and misunderstood professions known to man, yet apparently the world and his wife have had a go at it; I wish I had a tenner for every person I’ve ever met who, when I tell them what I do for a living, squeals: “Ooh, I’ve done some marketing!”

More often than not, though, what they’ve actually done is a bit of cold calling, or they’ve drawn up a leaflet or placed a classified ad in the local paper. But real marketing?  I doubt it. Continue reading “That there marketing lark… what’s it all about?” »