Since we live in a digital world where everything is tracked, business analytics is a powerful tool to take advantage of. No matter the industry, every company should collect data from everything they can in order to get a better idea about their performance.
If you don’t know previous results, you cannot know whether you made a good or bad business decision. In order to get comparable data, you should focus on collecting.
Nowadays, there are thousands of online tools that can help you track your company’s data and since most of the marketing is online, it is very easy to measure your results.
According to a study made by MicroStrategy, companies are using collected data to:
- Improve their financial performance 52%
- Come up with the right business strategy 57%
- Lower costs and boost business processes 60%
What is Business Analytics?
In short, business analytics is a process of using different methods to collect data that can be used for making informed business decisions.
There are different business analyses, such as:
- Predictive – Using statistics to predict future outcomes
- Descriptive – Using previous data to identify trends and patterns
- Prescriptive – Used data to test other techniques and determine the outcome from any given scenario
Basically, data is crucial for every part of the business. Whether you are using it for marketing purposes or making crucial business decisions, you need data in order to stay on the right path.
For example, if we take online horse racing with TwinSpires into consideration, the only way you can make a good betting decision is by comparing results from previous horse races.
Otherwise, you’ll leave everything up to luck.
Benefits of Business Analytics
Now since we know that business analytics is crucial for your success, let’s see some of the benefits that come with it.
1. Improved Decision-Making
As we mentioned before, one of the main purposes of the gathered data is to improve the decision-making process in the business. In other words, future decisions and paths that the company would take could be based on the information they gathered in the past.
Basically, business analytics is a valuable resource when approaching some kind of strategic decision in the company.
2. Greater Revenue
Businesses that use analytics in their processes experience significant financial returns over time. This has a lot to do with the improved decision-making system and better market targeting. Using data, companies can determine problems that need to be addressed which will potentially increase the overall revenue.
3. More Efficiency
Handling a successful business involves a lot of processes. This means that even the slightest inconvenience can cause damage to the business.
Using data, businesses can now track their operations and improve their efficiency. People think that business analytics is mainly used for fine-tuning outside business operations, but the truth is the process can improve your internal operations just as much.
By improving your operational efficiency, you can lower your company’s cost and improve your profitability. Also, you can use data to determine fragile links in your business that need to be addressed in order to have optimal performance.
Final Words
Clearly, business analytics is very important for every company no matter the size. In fact, data is now the most valuable resource on the planet, after surpassing the value of oil a couple of years ago.
In other words, now it is more important to track your processes and gather as much accurate data as possible rather than trying to make a decision based on experience.
So, if you are running a business ask yourself how you can improve the ways you gather data. You have to understand that the data is useless if you don’t know how to read it. This means that you need to develop a system that can sort your gathered data into smaller categories that are easier to understand.
