Big data isn’t going away. In fact, it’s probably only going to get bigger. If your company uses it, or you are thinking of crunching serious numbers, here’s how data analytics can work for you.
First, recognise the value
Data analysis is important to businesses is an understatement. In fact, no business can survive without analyzing available data.
Now, all data isn’t created equal. Does your data have any value at all? It’s OK if it doesn’t. Just be honest about it. Some data is very valuable — customer payment data, buying trends, and so on.
Other data, like internal sales and turnover, is also very valuable. But, what about data like website “hits” or open rates for email and social media “engagement?” These things are often praised by marketing gurus, but carry very little useable information.
Commit to a basic strategy
Commit yourself to a basic strategy that will efficiently capture, store access, and manipulate the data. It doesn’t matter whether you plan on doing it right away or not. It will make it much easier in the future for you if you do it now. Data analysis
Leverage your data
What can you do with your data? This is what you have to figure out. Develop internal resources or engage an outside company to help you leverage it into something useful. For example, what can you do with customer purchase data? A lot actually. You can use it to run seasonal sales, raise and lower prices based on consumer demand, and plan new product or service launches that correlate with consumer behavior.
Studying objectives
Having clearly defined objectives and metrics that reflect your company’s goals is important. So, for example, let’s say that you discover production is down. What do you do about it? You could analyze the data and figure out whether it’s in the process or the employees.
If it’s a process problem, you will need to tweak your production process. Maybe you need better equipment. But, maybe you need a better workflow and process.
If it’s the employees, maybe you need employee training and education.
Either way, you’ll need someone to manage all this data. If no one on your IT team knows how to do this, then you might want to invest in Tableau training.
Access
All data should be accessible to you and your IT team. Once it’s captured, you can look at it more granularly, and segment prospect data for efficient targeting. Or, if it’s on the production side, you can look at what needs to be improved. Sometimes, it means building in access through process implementation or an API.
Organize your data
There are many ways to organize your data. It can be rather laborious to do manually. But, it doesn’t have to be. Having a data organization platform simplifies the whole thing for you. And, usually, converting data to easy-to-read visuals makes it easier to analyze.
Improvement
Good analysis should tell a strong story about what’s happening, and should give you actionable results. Not only should it give you insights and a way to optimize performance, it should help point the way toward implementation.
Eve Davey has experience working as a data analysis, though she has now moved into the world of cyber security which she loves! When not coding for fun or tuning up her pc, Eve enjoys writing business and tech related articles.
