Integrating data analytics into business operations enriches decision-making by providing means to investigate various aspects of the business. Your business can benefit from analytics if it can collect sufficient quality data. It has a better look at its sales performance, production efficiency, cash flow management, customer service, marketing campaigns, and staff performance.
The availability of powerful analytics tools today means your business can move deeper than just descriptive analytics. Descriptive analytics examines data from events that have already occurred. But now, it’s possible to leverage statistical techniques and tools to identify patterns from historical data and make fairly accurate predictions about what’s likely to happen in the future.
Predictive analytics is extremely powerful. For instance, if you have a manufacturing enterprise with highly perishable products, accurate predictions of demand enable you to raise and lower production volumes to avoid stock-outs or overproduction overheads.
Optimizing Marketing
Marketing Evolution notes that gathering and analyzing data from marketing campaigns reveals the impact of the campaigns on your business’ revenue, customer perceptions of the business, or other target metrics. Campaigns normally take place across several channels. Analytics can reveal how well each channel did, which then informs decisions about the next campaign. The most impactful sources might receive more attention, while a change of strategy may be due for non-impactful channels.
Marketing analytics also reveal customer personas to your business. By gathering data about individual customers or clusters of customers, you can make better decisions regarding product development, pricing, and marketing style.
When applied in social media campaigns, analytics can be a powerful tool in helping your business remain relevant. Social media listening tools can tell you what topics customers are talking about. The tools are great for gathering information on people’s sentiments about the brand.
Analytics help illustrate the impact of social media posts. You can see the type of content that gets the most interaction. Videos and images receive the most traction.
Improving Cash Flow Management
One of the biggest causes of liquidity problems for businesses is a lack of visibility in the utilization of working capital. Having too much money tied up in receivables and slow-moving inventory can lead to problems in paying creditors. In addition, there may be certain avoidable expenses that may ease cash flow problems for the business.
Digitization of transactional data makes it easy to gather data on areas where your business is spending cash. It highlights the biggest expenses, average receivable days, and average inventory time. TechTarget points out that comparing data from different periods can reveal patterns, spikes that need investigation, and areas that have seen improvement.
Creating Operational Efficiencies via Automation
You can also use data analysis to improve workflows and processes for your business which in turn can increase productivity, improve employee morale, and lower operating costs. Task mining allows you to use data to figure out how to automate redundant and repetitive tasks. Whenever creating a plan for task mining or process mining, it’s a good idea to use a central document to guide your team through the process. Make sure to identify data, goals, stakeholders, and deadlines.
Analytics Has Limitless Potential
The range of things analytics can help improve in your business are limitless. As long as you can gather the relevant data, it’s possible to develop and test hypotheses, and the resulting conclusions are useful for future decisions. A data science consultant can help you craft a strategy for collection, cleansing, storage, and analysis of data. One thing is for sure, having this strategy and the data that comes with it will result in a more valuable and more marketable business when you are ready to sell.
When you’re ready to sell your business, trust Raleigh Business Brokers to help you locate qualified buyers, negotiate terms, and facilitate the transaction.
This was a guest post from Chelsea Lamb of Businesspop.net