5 Tips To Turn Business Data Into Actionable Insights
In this day and age, numerous enterprises are adopting big data for many reasons. These include gathering customer insights, enhancing customer experience, improving the innovation process, and increasing efficiency. However, getting information from your company’s data becomes valuable only when you generate actionable insights.
Accordingly, actionable insights are valuable information you can execute and expect a significant result in different business areas. Apart from raw marketing data like numbers and percentages, these actionable insights also provide critical information points that solve the customers’ problems, wants, and needs. Simply put, they reveal market trends along with context, leading to effective methods you can use to serve your target customers.
That said, you may consider applying the tips below to help you turn your company’s data into actionable insights.
- Leverage Data Governance Tools
As many businesses are increasingly embracing digital transformation, data governance tools have become vital factors for ensuring the integrity of their business data. Data governance is a set of protocols, procedures, metrics, and policies that control how and when you manage, use, and store the business data. Data governance regards your company’s culture, approach to data, and data confidentiality. It helps everyone to use data responsibly and effectively, allowing you to turn business data into actionable insights.
Therefore, although data quality and governance are two different capabilities, they function together to maintain business data quality. This way, it will ensure usefulness and accuracy in your data-driven decision-making. Likewise, it increases the business revenue as the company’s regulations are in check, customer loyalty is assured, and data are sorted and analyzed.
Moreover, data governance helps you improve your decision-making by giving you access to well-governed and readily available data to deliver accurate insights for huge decisions within your company. It also provides valuable information on all business areas, from inventory count to customer satisfaction. Leveraging and using insights acquired from data governance tools can streamline operational efficiency regarding product quality, production speed, and resource usage.
- Define Your Objectives
The best marketing insights entirely depend on your goals. If you don’t define your business objectives, there’s no way to turn big data into valuable insights. That’s why it’s crucial to ensure you understand what you’re trying to learn about your target customer’s behaviors and the problems they have, and know precisely how your company’s products or services can reduce or even eliminate the challenges they face.
Hence, you can use the SMART goal method to illustrate your goals and help you achieve them. SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. You should define what kind of products or services you plan to sell. Then define your target audience and the features of the products or services that customers would want to purchase. After that, you should determine the essential metrics you can use to help you measure your progress. Another thing you should consider is whether your products or services are realistic enough to sell to your target customers.
Next, make sure to have a full grasp of the relevance of your products or services to your business objectives. It’s also essential to give yourself a deadline for accomplishing your goals, which can be in particular months or a year. Doing so will provide you with a sense of urgency, increasing the chances of achieving your business objectives, including converting business data into actionable insights.
- Present Your Ideas Effectively
It’s worth remembering that bad presentations can prevent your valuable business data from converting into valuable insights. Being a good data analyst means you can present your ideas effectively. Unfortunately, many data analysts cannot explain their data analysis concisely, confidently, and effectively. As a result, they fall short when presenting their ideas to stakeholders. So, apart from reading business data, it’s also crucial to hone your skills when it comes to storytelling without only depending on charts, graphs, or presentation slides.
Consequently, don’t just use data as your primary support, and learn to shorten a long story into a brief statement. So, before presenting your ideas, consider asking yourself simple questions regarding what the information means, the connection of the results and conclusions to the original problem in the business, and the point you’re trying to make.
Additionally, after ensuring the proper delivery of your ideas, you should then create a narrative that should resonate with your audience.
- Use Visualization To Convey Your Message
Although data analysis makes more sense to data scientists and data analysts, it’s worth considering that the sales team, marketers, and other stakeholders will also need to check your analysis. For that reason, on top of crafting a resonating data story, having a clear visualization to share your ideas is another critical thing that can make a huge difference in turning big data into actionable insights. Data visualization translates your multiple information into something easy to understand, present, and strategize. It also helps you discover secret patterns so you can connect the dots and witness the big picture. Having significant data allows you to improve decision-making in marketing and strategies, increase customer satisfaction, and drive revenue growth so that you can predict failure issues for future business strategies.
Furthermore, ensure that you adopt big data technologies, such as data analytics, wisely. These are key factors for a better digital transformation and excellent customer experience.
- Make Decisions And Apply Them
After taking all the necessary things into account, it’s time to put the objectives and insights into action. For instance, if you’ve found out that providing a discount on a product during a particular period will increase sales, then you need to organize the groundwork to lower the prices and sell the offer in advance. Keep in mind as well that your target customers should know that you have something interesting to offer to them.
Another action you might take would be leveraging your strategy by adding new behavioral segments to your current ones that align with customer locations or lifestyles. An advanced segmentation will help you track your customers’ behavior and use them to meet their needs.
Conclusion
Overall, it’s essential to have an objective in mind when you’re thinking of getting valuable insights from your business data. Knowing the purpose of your project will give excellent alignment among all team members involved, peace of mind when specific issues arise, and guidance for proper decision-making.
