Business analytics software provides businesses with the tools they need to understand their businesses better through the gathering and analysis of data. With the right business analytics software on their side, businesses can transform their strategies and turbocharge their current approach. Here’s everything you need to know about business analytics software and why it matters.
Augment Your Audience Data
You can never have too good an understanding of who your audience is. The right audience data can be very powerful on its own, but once you combine it with business analytics data, you can really unlock the potential contained within.
• Who are buying your products and driving your sales? Any modern marketer worth their salt can tell you just how important it is to understand exactly who your target audience is. The better you understand your target audience, and the more clearly defined they are as a demographic, the easier it will be for you to focus your marketing efforts on them. Not only this, but detailed information about your target audience demographic can also help you to formulate other strategies in a more informed way.
By combining the insights that you are able to glean from both your audience research and your business analytics, you can use both to achieve more than you could with either individually. For example, if you are closely monitoring the chatter on social media regarding your latest marketing campaign, you can then compare this data with your campaign data in order to build a picture of exactly what your audience is responding well to and why.
• What draws customers to your business? Business analytics software can reveal a great deal of information about your business, often shedding a light on things that you had never even considered before. Business analytics tools are not designed to measure the same metrics as tools designed to evaluate marketing campaigns. However, by using business analytics tools to measure certain variables in the wake of a marketing campaign, you can glean some incredibly powerful insights regarding who is responding to your marketing and why.
For example, if your latest marketing campaign has involved distribution channels that you have not previously explored, a better than expected performance might tell you that these are channels worth exploring in the future. Whenever your business analytics tools are picking up a significant uptick in interest following a new marketing campaign, you should be seeking to understand what is behind this uptick.
• What are the most effective ways of encouraging your customers to spend more money?
Your business analytics tools will provide you with some of the most detailed data regarding your current sales and the overall health of your business. Once you have figured out how to combine them with your other methods of measuring your performance, you will have a very powerful method for honing in on the techniques and approaches that are most effective at encouraging your customers to spend money with you.
Accurately Evaluate Your Current Strategy
You can accurately evaluate your current strategy by doing the following:
Measure performance against your goals: In order to build an accurate picture of your business’s health, you need to be able to accurately measure your current performance. Business analytics will enable you to gather the raw data that you need to produce a more refined strategy that takes into account your past successes and failures.
A common mistake amongst newer and less experienced entrepreneurs is to focus only on current results and not give enough time to evaluating past efforts. Evidence of this can be seen from managers to marketers, and this is a problem that affects businesses at every level. Investing in proper business analytics capabilities is the best way of preventing your strategy and your business from stagnating.
Make more informed decisions about how to proceed: Understanding your current approaches, including both successes and failures, is essential to planning for the future. Business analytics helps you to understand the lessons that are contained within your data and how you can apply them to your business in order to formulate a more effective strategy.
Business analytics software is designed to ensure that businesses can make more informed and accurate decisions about their future strategy. Simply deciding whether you have achieved your goals or not will severely limit the lessons that you are able to take away from your professional endeavors.
Visualize your data much more easily: The easier data is to take in, the more effective it is as a learning tool. Machine learning algorithms can enable us to make some pretty incredible deductions using apparently unremarkable data. However, the conclusions that we draw in this way remain abstract to us – we have to trust the algorithms rather than being able to see those conclusions in the data ourselves.
Business analytics tools provide you with a means of visualizing data in a way that makes it easy to digest and understand. Changing the way that we present data can completely transform the way that it is received by the audience. By doing this, we can make the same data significantly easier to take in and can even enable people to draw conclusions from data just by glancing at it.
How to Choose the Right Software
If you want to get the most out of business analytics, you need to have the right software in place. The best option for any specific business will depend on their individual circumstances. Aston University has a useful guide to some of the best business analytics software available today, click here to check out their list.
Integration: Whenever you buy new software for your business, you should always be considering how it will integrate with your existing systems. Any software that is not compatible with your existing setup is going to add a financial and time cost to your installation – sometimes a significant one. For some businesses, the costs of integration might be worth it, but if at all possible, you should look for business analytics tools that will slot easily into your existing setup.
Choosing software that integrates easily with your existing setup doesn’t just save you money; it also greatly reduces the amount of time it takes you to get up and running with your new system.
Usability: As well as looking for software that integrates with your existing setup, your other primary concern when choosing business analytics software should be how easy it is to use. You want to choose software that is as straightforward and intuitive as possible. If there is a significant learning curve associated with the software, it is going to take a lot longer for your workers to get to grips with it. As your business grows and you begin to look for more powerful analytics software, you may begin to look for more advanced feature sets that necessitate a more complex interface. However, there will always be some options that are better documented and that make it easier for a new user to get up to speed.
Make sure that you consult with the people who are going to be using the software the most to find out what their preferences are. If you want to get the most out of business analytics software, you need to put it in the hands of people who understand how best to use it.
Security: This is an especially important consideration for cloud-based analytics tools. In order for analytical tools to work, you need to feed them data about your business. In some cases, this will include corporate data of a sensitive nature, or even data about your customers. It is essential that any analytical tools that you share your data with are able to keep it secure.
The good news is that there are plenty of business analytics tools on the market today that offer absolutely first-class security. As long as you are willing to do your homework, which you should always do when you are buying software for your business, you should be able to hone in on a secure and reliable option.
Platform versatility: Most of your workers will have smartphones of their own, regardless of the industry that you work in. Business software today is often platform agnostic, meaning that you can access it from just about any device. Whether this is because the software is cloud-based, or because the developers have taken the time to produce multiple versions for different platforms, this provides real benefits to businesses.
Choosing software that can be accessed from any device or platform enables your workers to take advantage of it while on the go If your business enables remote working, then this also ensures that your remote workers will always have access to the tools that they need.
Access to the right business analytics software can completely transform the way you run your business. Business analytics tools enable us to access the true power of the data the businesses today routinely generate. The insights that business analytics software grants us access to can provide unprecedented insight and understanding into the inner-workings of your business.
