3 Reasons Analytics Is Key to Your Company's Future

There are several important factors to consider when you have a business: business name, logo, marketing techniques, how to advertise, and more come to mind. Whether you are starting up a new venture or continuing to run a company that has been passed down in your family from generation to generation, analytics is key to your company's future.

What is “analytics”?

Analytics refers to the systematic computational analysis of data or statistics. It is “the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data.” It involves studying the history of your business and other businesses in your industry, and comparing them with present-day information and performance. You can use this information to make better decisions about your company.

Improves marketing strategies

One major way analytics is key to your company's future is that you can use the data you collect to influence your marketing strategy moving forward. For example, you can compare past data regarding a promotion you ran, and see if the response was good enough to make it worth running that promo again. You can also use the data to clearly identify trends within your industry and tailor marketing strategies to suit your needs. You no longer have to hope your promotional attempts will succeed. You can view the data and let it inform what you implement so it will succeed.

Identify new business opportunities

Another way analytics is key to your company's future is that it can identify relationships within your data. For example, let's imagine that you sell gourmet hot dogs. Analytics could point out that every year during March Madness, your sales go up 5%. Using this knowledge, you may decide to create a basketball theme for all your spring advertisements, furthering the connection between basketball and hot dogs in the minds of your customers. When you collect all the data you can regarding your business, you can use concrete evidence to identify and act on new business opportunities.

Identify key products for growth in a given industry

Analytics is key to your company's future because it can identify the products and services that will help your business move to the top of your industry. For example, if you own a photography business, you may notice the data shows that you make the biggest bang for your buck when you photograph weddings. It may also indicate that this is true across the photography industry. Therefore, you can determine that if you want to grow your business, you need to be shooting more weddings. Using analytics, you can pinpoint exactly what you should be pushing in order to be one of the leaders in your industry.

As you can see, analytics is key to your company's future. Analytics & Business Intelligence give you clear and concrete evidence that you can use to make important decisions about your business. As technology continues to advance, we can only assume that the data received will not only be better, but more encompassing, and thus, more helpful. If you aren't using analytics to help your business, you should start...today.