How Data Analytics Can Grow your Business

When it comes to business buzzwords, data analysis should be top of the female founder list.

“A very effective way to influence an organization,” says Janice Hammond, the Harvard Business School Professor who teaches the Business Analytics online course. “If you… go into a meeting, and other people have opinions, but you have data to support your arguments and your recommendations, you’re going to be influential.”

She’s right! Around 59% of businesses analyze data to accurately forecast risks related to consumer action, market trends and assist in revenue increase. They can support almost every area of your business. A study from MicroStrategy showed the most common reasons for businesses to use analytics were cost efficiency, strategy and even innovation.

Tools such as Google Analytics, Buffer, Cyfe and Clicky Web Analytics, prove how valuable data can be. But what you do with this data is what can cost your company.

Flip those numbers from a headache into your secret for success with these data analysis applications:

Acquire your Target 

One of the first key questions of your Marketing Plan is “Who is your buyer persona or target audience?” Targeting with precision saves you time, money and effort otherwise spent advertising everything to everyone, the equivalent of throwing everything you have at the wall and hoping something sticks.

Understanding who your customer is; their demographics, consumer behavior and what advertising they respond better to, helps a business define its identity. These tasks become a lot smoother with the help of analytics adding a framework to build around. Business analysis arguably does no better job than to benchmark performance of your offering against the wider market.

The information you receive is essential in determining the niche you will target, as well as the advertising you should adopt! Data can help you understand what methods of advertising work best with your target audience—like whether you should focus your energy (and money) on social media campaigns over traditional advertisements.

Netflix surfed the wave of success by using big data analytics (from their 100 million subscribers) for targeted advertising. If you have Netflix, you are probably familiar with “watch-next” suggestions. These suggestions are a result of the analytics gathered from your past searches and watch data, which gives the company insight into yours and other subscribers’ top interests.

Cut and Gain

Making more informed decisions is not only great for narrowing down your targeting strategy, but also for cutting your costs. Whether you’re selling a service or a product, ideally you’d want them performing to their peak! In reality, often some offerings just don’t do as well as others.

With analytics you can determine the aspects of your business that are superfluously using finances as well as the areas that could do with a banking boost! This opens up precise action whilst minimizing filler activities that add little concrete value to your business.

Straight-to-the-point action can save you unnecessary costs whilst also providing significant financial returns. Businesses that can determine their gains through data analysis have an average eight percent increase in revenues and ten percent reduction in costs!

Using analytics for a clear financial payoff is exactly what Uber did in early 2018. The ride-hailing company used prescriptive analytics to examine whether to update its Customer Obsession Ticket Assistant (COTA)–a tool that improves speed and accuracy when responding to support tickets.

A/B testing compared user experience results of two different choices and found the new iteration would be faster, leading to more customer satisfaction. These insights not only simplified Uber’s ticket resolution process but saved the company millions of dollars.

Crisis Alert and Avert

As a business owner, you’re probably familiar with this one; whether a big corporation or a microbusiness family enterprise, your business baby is likely to run into problems every now and then.

Foreseeing a risk, fleshing it out and figuring out its potential impact is even more critical now, in an environment of business instability. Analytics improve your risk management processes and help you avoid major bumps in operations.

Through data analysis and visualization, smarter risk mitigation can help you identify your areas of weakness or potential risks by quantifying and modelling risks you face every day.

Using big data to inform risk management is what put UOB Singapore bank on the map. As a financial institution, their potential for high losses from poor risk management is huge.

So, UOB bank tested a risk management system based on big data to reduce the risk calculation time. What used to take UOB bank 18 hours, now only takes a few minutes. In the future, the bank might even be able to carry out real-time risk analysis, thanks to the initiative.

Forecasting Sunshine

So, you’ve handled your problems and created additional revenue, now it’s time to reinvest in innovation!

Innovating your products and services can give you the edge over your competition. It could mean designing new product lines or simply remixing existing products—but every innovation process begins from establishing what customers require.

No matter how confident you may feel, a gut instinct is not sufficient for our business to remain competitive in this fast-changing digital age. Analyzing big data can give you an idea of future trends in consumer behavior.

These predictions not only boost your innovation department, but also bolster  for rainy days. If trends uncover weaknesses in your business that may be seasonal, you can prepare a strategy to stay dry!

Final Say

Women have worked for years to dispel the myth that we are driven solely by emotions. Backing up your business decisions with cold hard facts can really strengthen your position, and help you make calls that your whole team can unequivocally get behind.

Whatever industry you work in, business can get personal. So let numbers do the tough work for you, leaving you with space for the important math like how to run the business you deserve!

Written for Empowering a Billion Women, April 27 2021