Nobody likes uncertainty. Unfortunately, the coronavirus pandemic brought a lot of it. Months into the crisis, the business landscape is still largely unpredictable. Most companies are battling for stability and the reality of the new norms. So it’s no surprise that more businesses are turning to analytics to get hindsight, insight, and foresight into their operations.
As you may well know, data analytics reveals several fascinating trends, correlations, and insight into a business’s performance and strategies essential for its survival. It can transform an organization from a knowing company to a learning business that continues to evolve and adapt to emerging trends and economic realities.
In this period, companies can be categorized into two. On one side are those that have benefited positively from the crisis (this includes the likes of Amazon and Zoom that have raked in so much profit). On the other side are a lot of businesses impacted negatively by the pandemic.
Regardless of the category, your company falls into. Whether you are making way more than before or less, analytics can help you find order amidst the current chaos in the marketplace.
If you are on a positive slide, analytics can help you identify the factors that are working in your favor, so you can keep leveraging on it even when all this is over.
However, analytics can help you navigate the crisis and identify potential solutions and alternatives if you are struggling with the current realities.
Making data-driven decisions increases your chances of success, and it’s especially vital in a period of recovery when any mistake can be costly. This reflects most respondents’ belief in the 2020 COVID-19 Impact Survey, who sees data-driven decision-making as a must for business success.
49% of the respondents to the survey are launching new analytics and business intelligence projects or continuing already planned analytic projects for their company.
Get Help With Your Analytics
Data analytics is not set in stone; rather, it’s a continuous cycle that allows you to understand and improve your business processes. The challenge for most businesses is identifying the value in the tremendous amount of data they collect.
Most analytic tools can help you access loads of data, but they provide very little in terms of insight.
While it’s a bit complex transforming bundles of unorganized and unstructured data sets, the bigger challenge comes with listening to the data and making sense of it.
It was Jim Bergeson who said, “Data will talk to you if you’re willing to listen.” Conversing data can be loud and noisy, and if you don’t listen carefully, you won’t hear the voice. This is where most organizations struggle.
If you are facing any challenges with data analytics, remember, we are here to help. Our team of expert data scientists will work with you to get the valuable insight required to move your business to the next level.
But before then, here are some best practices to help you use data analytics to achieve better and faster decisions.
Define A Business Use Case
Data analysis, just like any other business endeavor, is more beneficial if you start with a goal. Take a good look at your company and identify problems or challenges that can be addressed with the data you have. Collecting and analyzing data for the sake of it may be fun, but it can be a waste of time and resources.
It’s essential to identify the business problem you want to solve using data analytics.
What are the insights you hope to obtain? What do you intend to measure? What goals do your hope to attain using data analytics? Answering these questions is essential to arrive at where you anticipated.
For instance, your website produces a large amount of data. If collected, stored, and analyzed that data can provide insight on performance, and other valuable information that can help you optimize your site and marketing strategies.
Therefore, if you are battling low conversion or high bounce rate, you can turn to analytics to solve this problem. Analytics can also be applied in predicting customer behavior, making business decisions, monitoring employees’ performance, improving business planning, sales, and more.
It gives you a competitive edge over your competition in terms of marketing and sales – however, implementation matters.
Plan How To Apply The Insight In Various Areas Of Business
Besides identifying business problems to solve with analytics, you also need to determine how the insight from the data can be used to solve them. It’s essential to bear in mind that about 70 to 80 percent of an analyst’s time is spent on generating and analyzing data. Only 20-30 percent of the time is left for implementing solutions. Then again, the success of analytics isn’t entirely based on the analytics process but instead on its implementation and its impact.
Insight and findings that cost companies lots of money are often left gathering dust because it is difficult to identify how they can be implemented. Implementation can sometimes also be too expensive or limited by industry regulations. So it’s vital to have the mechanism in place for quick deployment of analytic solutions.
Embrace Analytics Innovation
Your analytics is only as good as the tools you use. To get better insights and more reliable information, you need the right balance of human analytic expertise and analytic tools. It’s vital to employ a top tool like FoxMetrics to collect, store, organize, and analyze your data.
Data analytic tools and infrastructures are continuously evolving. There’s been a move to more prescriptive analytics that are actionable in real-time. You must key into every innovation to learn more from your data and make quicker data-driven decisions.
Run Regular Analytic experiments
In addition to your structured analytics, it pays to take time out and occasionally pour over your data. Review the data from your website, third party transactions, sales trends, and so on. You never know what you will find. Most times, valuable insight is buried in unlikely places.
Leverage Cloud Computing Platforms
Unlike before, you no longer need to make massive investments in infrastructure and specialized skills to use analytics in your business. You can leverage cloud service companies like FoxMetrics, which is fully equipped and secured to handle your analytic needs. These third-party services are quicker and less costly than setting up your own systems since you’ll only be paying for the capacity of services you need.
If you are slacking in your use of analytics due to funding issues, consider partnering with FoxMetrics to meet all your analytic needs at an affordable rate.
Use a Large Dataset and sample
The richer your dataset, the higher your chances of gaining valuable insight from it. This is why it’s essential to continue creating, collecting, and storing more data.
Work on creating more valuable data and don’t sloppily discard data you have already collected without analyzing to know if it contains value. It’s, however, important to collect data based on needs. Not all data is essential, and collecting irrelevant data may cost you more in storage and analytics.
In addition, your decisions should be based on large data sets and samples. Most analytic tools use sampling. But it limits the level of insight you gain. As the saying goes, if you use a 20% data sample, your projections are only 20 percent correct. You’ll only get the whole picture of things if you use a large dataset, which is why FoxMetrics stands out, as it provides the full view of things by analyzing the whole data.
Have The Right Analytic Expertise
A company’s usage of analytics ends where the knowledge of its analysts ends. It’s just that simple. Despite the availability of automated tools, you may miss incredible opportunities or potential harmful threats because of a lack of experience.
Ensure that the people you partner with for your data analytics projects understand your specific needs and have the skills to build the ideal analytic models.
With the abundance of commercial analytic tools and open-source, analysts often use them without understanding what they mean, how they work, and how they can affect business decisions. So it’s up to you to take precaution to prevent a ‘wild goose chase’ in the name of insight.
Consider Analytic Work A Search For Buried Treasure
Analytics is a search for valuable insight buried in a pile of data. Your approach to analytics plays a pivotal role in how beneficial it becomes to you. Identify the problem you intend to solve, plan how to implement the solution, and pound your way through available data until you find the insight you seek.
This process can be painstaking and tedious, but it’s worth the effort and resources. It’s just like mining for gold. With persistence and a bit of luck, you’ll find the information your business requires.
Conclusion
Embracing the power of data analytics and technology can shoot your business above its current struggles. You’ll make improved business decisions and dowse any negative impact of the financial crisis on your business.