With your measurement system in place and data for your small business at your fingertips, we can now start leveraging that data.

Just as a quick recap from the past few weeks, we looked at identifying systems gaps or “deltas” in the systems you use to run your small business.

With your systems in place, we then looked to your “Measurement Delta” – looking at key areas of your systems to identify what, how and when to measure and collect important data you need to improve.

With that data in hand, we can now look at “Improvement Deltas” – areas or gaps from where you are, to where you want go with your small business.

The Improvement Delta

I touched on this a bit last week, but one of the things that’s often missing with small businesses is defining what success means for you and your business.

Knowing what to measure is half the battle – understanding and defining success in terms of data is another.

Does an increase in some measurements mean success? Or do you want to decrease certain metrics?

If an increase is successful for a measurement, how much of an increase will mean you’re improving? (And vice-versa for decreasing metrics).

Being unclear or vague about what improvement looks like for your measurements means your “Improvement Delta” is large. When that delta is large it means that whatever you’re measuring is meaningless.

As you start to define (and be specific about) what improvement means for the things you measure, your Improvement Delta slowly approaches zero – which gives meaning to your data, and ultimately helps guide your small business toward more successful outcomes.

Improvement In Mathematics

As always here, if you’ve followed along with my blog you know I like to relate business related items to the Mathematics world.

Improvement, to me, is very closely related to something called “gradient descent” (or ascent in this case) – or mathematical optimization.

If you remember from the “Systems Delta” blog, that a system is just a function: it takes an input and creates an output through a series of steps.

With your “Measurement Delta” you’re essentially collecting data from that function (the output in most cases). Charted over time, you can see how changes in the input affect changes in the output through that data.

What gradient descent (or ascent) here does is help folks find a maximum (or minimum) result for that data, through iterative steps.

Every time you define what improvement means for a particular system (function), you will be taking small steps to improve that system until it settles at a point where your success is defined (the local maximum – or minimum).

Gradient descent is somewhat simplified here, but what we’re trying to do is take small steps to improve your systems until we reach our predefined measure for success of that system.

Aligned Improvement Over Time (The Alignment Delta Feedback Loop)

Taking a (large) step back, as a reminder of our “Alignment Delta” and how, before anything, you need to be properly aligned with your best customers in order to make any of this work.

As you start defining what improvement looks like for each system, you can leverage that data from many of those systems to help keep you aligned with your best customers.

For example, let’s say from your marketing system you define success as an increase in leads of 10%.

You take the steps to improve and see an increase in leads and by doing so, you notice leads coming from a new source or location within your service/delivery area.

Now, because you have that data, it can help you align some of your marketing efforts toward that new source or location.

Another example – let’s say that you notice from your post-service system, while increasing the number of reviews and feedback participation among your customers, that many of your customers are asking about a service or product that you don’t currently have in your set of services or products (that are similar to your current services or products).

This could very well indicate a need that isn’t met by small businesses that are in the same alignment with you in your area – a small realignment of your service offering could be a path to new revenue.

Wrapping Up The Delta Series

Over the course of the next year or so I’ll be jumping into each one of these “Deltas” to look at more specific areas in each that you can start looking at improving your small business through digital marketing.

Wherever you’re at with your small business, I hope that by reading this you start asking questions about each step I’ve outlined and you get inspired by some of the ideas presented.

Much more to come & thanks for following along.