Business Tip: Always Check the Forecast

We have tasks to do everyday. Sometimes we plan to go out and play, swim at the beach or unwind at the park. But when we are about to go out, the rain suddenly pour down and our plan is not pursued and accomplished.

The problem here is that we do not usually check the weather forecast. We don’t usually spend time to check whether that day would be a sunny or a rainy day. We don’t check the rate of chance of raining.

What if you own a small business? Let’s say you are selling ice cream in the streets? If you don’t know that it will likely to rain, and you still go there out in the streets to sell ice cream, will people come to you with their umbrellas and buy your ice cream?

As business owners and entrepreneurs, we should have business intelligence. Nowadays, information are almost everywhere. For example, if a good weather is essential to our daily business success, we can always check a 5-day weather forecast on the Internet. It’s even found right at your smart phone if you have a weather application.

Aside from weather forecast, there are also other important forecasts or projections that we can obtain around our business environment, such as financial forecast, market forecast, and your website’s traffic projection.

Financial forecasts can be provided by your accountant or financial analyst. You can also make your own financial forecast if you know financial analysis.

You can also make a market or sales forecast by analyzing and understanding your customers’ behavior by using data and demographics, including your customers’ age, work, location and feedback.

If you have a company website, you can use Google Analytics to check important data about your website, such as its volume of traffic and referrals.

If you are utilizing a Facebook Page for your business, you can freely use Facebook Insights to understand your Page’ subscribers and make a forecast out of its raw data.

When marketing or advertising your products on the Internet, you also have to forecast your target market. You have to know their behavior and moods. You have to know what particular hour are they checking their Facebook News Feed. You don’t just share your business promotion on Facebook anytime. You have to determine the day or hour where your target audience are online or else you would be wasting your promotion, announcing your product to Facebook users at the time they aren’t online.

The bottom line is that information are everywhere. And by optimizing these pieces of information that are related to our business, we can always obtain or create a forecast to guide us in doing business. This should become an essential part of your business strategy to get you closer to success.

So always capitalize your business forecast so that, next time, you won’t go selling ice cream in the streets in an unexpected rainy day.