97.2% of organizations invest in big data and AI (source: New Vantage). This means that your business will lose out on growth opportunities if you don’t manage it well.
Without proper data analysis, companies tend to make uninformed decisions and miss out on chances to convert. This is why you must learn how to leverage big data to find hidden opportunities for your business.
What is data analytics and why is it so important?
Data analytics definition: Data analytics is studying and analyzing datasets to draw conclusions and find opportunities. It helps companies extrapolate information from raw data to identify patterns and trends and gain valuable insights to help them shape their business.
Data lies at the heart of every business, helping them understand customer preferences; personalize content, products, and services; enhance marketing campaigns, and make faster and more informed decisions. If your company wants to gain a competitive advantage, you must weave data analytics intricately into your marketing strategy. Use the following strategies to chalk out a plan to accomplish your goals with data.
1. Start with clear goals
Goal setting is an important aspect of web analytics. Defining your goals allows you to prioritize the data that matters most to your business. An absence of these will lead you astray.
Answering the following questions will make it easier to define the key performance indicators (KPIs) that are significant to your growth:
- What do you want to accomplish?
- What factors will push you to achieve specific goals?
- What strategies will help your business to focus on cost savings?
- What can you do to improve supply chain performance?
Your data analytics projects should always aim to meet realistic, measurable goals that show the correlation between business workflows and decision-making processes, pushing your growth to greater heights. As a business, you need to uncover which type of data helps you reach each goal to take your business to the next level.
2. Determine what data is useful
Often accumulating data or having a lack of data is not the issue; a company’s inability to determine what data is useful causes problems. A lot of data can make it unclear for you to understand what data to consider and what has to be sidelined for later.
60% of businesses don’t know how much poor-quality data costs them because they don’t measure the impact (source: Gartner). As bad data is present in all data stores, businesses need to authenticate data to avoid discrepancies and ensure data accuracy, helping make good strategic decisions.
Conversely, when you encounter bad data, don’t discard it, but instead, check for hidden opportunities that you can use for other goals.
3. Have a focus for your data
Dive deep into big data by asking questions that matter. Businesses are often inundated with large amounts of data that can be difficult to organize.
Ensuring that your data questions are clear, concise, and measurable will help you spot underlying patterns that you can turn into actionable opportunities and potential data analytics solutions that will help your business.
Some specific questions that you can frame your data analysis around are:
- How can I drive more customer engagement?
- How can I reach out to more audiences?
- What is the level of accuracy I need to achieve the numerical result?
- How can I validate the results that I achieved?
- How can I ensure data quality?
- What time frame should I be focusing on?
- What type of statistical analysis do I need to apply?
4. Be open minded
A key thing to remember is that if you’re too focused on what you want to see in data analytics, you may miss out on some important opportunities for growth during the process. Having predetermined objectives or preconceived notions about the data you’re working on will help you, but you must remember to keep an open mind to ensure you don’t miss out.
When you’re only looking for what you want to see, you’ll present biased data that does not represent everything you are considering. When the analysis is biased, it only tells a specific story that does not represent the whole picture. This will lead to the inability to find opportunities and make strategic decisions.
The more open-minded you are with data, the more opportunities you will come across. Instead of avoiding biases that you or your team may have, acknowledge them first and see how they affect your thought process. This will help you notice any glitches, patterns, or opportunities you may have overlooked and lock in those data points to enhance your business.
5. Be equipped with other information
But it’s not just big data that you should be looking at! Use your data in tandem with company reports, customer insights, your team’s knowledge, and more to ensure you can make actionable decisions and understand why your data looks the way it does.
This can help you gain insights into:
- Mitigating risks associated with business operations
- Increasing customer retention
- Managing your inventory
- Simplifying logistics
- Identifying bottlenecks
This is especially important when you’re looking at big data. The data alone won’t paint much of a picture, so use all of your resources to help shape what you’re looking at.
6. Map it out
Data interpretation becomes difficult if we fail to understand the big picture. Data visualization helps businesses overcome this challenge by visually presenting information through graphs, maps, infographics, fever charts, heat maps, and histograms.
From identifying areas of improvement, customer satisfaction, and dissatisfaction to helping businesses choose key markets for products and services, big data visualization helps business stakeholders predict future sales, revenue, and growth.
Incorporating this into your big data analytics strategy makes it easy to analyze and notice trends, outliers, and patterns in large data sets. This procedure uses legible layouts and colors to clearly depict the elements you’re concentrating on and areas you can leverage for your business.
7. Find the right team
Sometimes, businesses tend to use people who aren’t data scientists for data crunching, like personnel from the IT or marketing teams. Doing this will not only have negative repercussions on your business decisions but also deviate the hired skill from their core responsibilities.
For this reason, hiring a professional data scientist is a great option as they can navigate big data sets and understand growth opportunities. Make sure you always have someone dedicated to exploring data to identify opportunities to take your company to the next level.
On the other hand, why hire a single data science professional when you can benefit from a team of experts by partnering with a growth marketing agency to accomplish your data analytics goals?
8. Automate the process
While you want professionals that have a deeper understanding of big data crunching, you don’t want them to be overwhelmed by the task. After all, a data scientist’s main task should be data analysis, not manual processing.
For this reason, automated data analytics can help speed up the process and help you unlock new insights. By automating the process, you can get the data sets your team needs with little to no human intervention at all.
By adopting automation, businesses can speed up the analytics process; analyze data more effectively; and save time, money, and resources. Data scientists will now have the ability to concentrate on drawing new insights to drive your decision-making process.
From data discovery and preparation to replication and warehouse maintenance, automated analytics can help you easily carry out various tasks of different complexities.
Become the master of data
Data is your ticket to audience insights, interests, behaviors and more! This information can help you turn your marketing strategy into one that is able to deliver the right message in the right place at the right time quickly and efficiently – presenting you as a business that truly cares about its customers. Don’t let these opportunities escape you! Learn more in Data and Web Analytics: The Complete Marketer’s Manual.
Data analytics is a key element for business progression, regardless of your company’s size. Good data analytics can be difficult for you to deal with if you don’t know where to start. Partnering with an accomplished growth marketing agency can help you ease your burden as they have the tools to get you on the right path.
Growth Marketing Genie has a team of experienced data scientists and marketing professionals that help you spot hidden growth opportunities with data analytics solutions for your business.
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