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You’ll agree when we say data is the new gold in today’s business world.
In fact, according to a recent study by Micro Strategy, companies worldwide are using data:
Why the sudden rush to leverage data?
It turns out the benefits of data analytics enjoyed by market leaders, such as Facebook and Google, are too sweet to ignore. Business analytics is nothing new in the current world. It looks somewhat new due to the emergence of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
As a professional in business analytics, your key task is to act as the bridge between decision-makers and raw data.
That’s not all.
You need a solid data visualization strategy and tools in your arsenal to succeed in the analytics profession.
In this blog, you’ll learn:
Before we discuss the benefits of data analytics, let’s define a couple of terms.
Definition: Business analytics is a process of investigating raw data to draw meaningful insights.
The field of data analytics is advancing to new heights at an alarming rate due to emerging systems, such as machine learning algorithms.
One of the benefits of data analytics is that it supports decision-making processes in business. Besides, you can use data to personalize marketing messages and develop targeted offers. To enjoy the benefits of data analytics fully, you need visualization techniques.
Yes, you read that right.
You must be thinking what are the benefits and what insights can you gain from data analytics?
A huge chunk of businesses is still betting on gut feel rather than facts and data.
One of the key reasons for this could be a lack of access to quality data to back decision-making processes.
Business analytics can help you distill signals from noise in your raw data. And this can save massive amounts of time. Just imagine the competitive advantage you would enjoy by relying on data to make strategic decisions.
Analytics can improve the productivity and efficiency of staff in your business. In other words, you can leverage data to predict risks, such as declining productivity.
Charts and graphs can help you track productivity metrics in real-time.
With a solid business analytics strategy, you can easily point out gaps and improvement areas in your workplace or business.
In today’s world, customers have a broader range of choices.
If your business is aligned with the customers’ desires and expectations, you can easily find yourself in a downward spiral. Customers change their minds as they are continuously exposed to new information in their purchasing journey.
With the vast amount of data, it’s practically impossible for you to make sense of all the changes in the market.
One of the core benefits of data analytics is that it provides you with answers about the changing behavior of the market. You can easily point out significant shifts in tastes and preferences by using charts.
Timely awareness of the change in customer behavior can be the decisive factor in the current competitive landscape.
Gone are days you could easily sell a standard set of products and services to customers.
Today’s market craves products and services that can meet their individual needs.
One of the benefits of data analytics is that it can help you keep track of your target market’s tastes, preferences, and needs. You can leverage data from various attributions, such as social media and websites to create a reliable persona for the market.
Data driven business growth can bring drastic change in your business if you are using it accurately. Companies can conduct surveys and collect large amount of data. Data analysis continues to help companies update existing products while revolutionizing new ones. By collecting large amounts of data, companies are able to distinguish what outbursts their customer base.
If a company wants to win in today’s market, it can no longer rely on instinct. Organizations can now implement processes to track three sixty degree view of the business from sales, marketing, operations and more to bring innovation in every area which can leave positive effect on business growth.
Data analytics is a two-edged sword, just like any other process in your business (or workplace). In other words, it has both strengths and weaknesses, which we’ll cover shortly.
In the next section, we’ll explore the benefits and limitations of business data analytics.
Imagine there’s a misalignment between different teams or departments in your business or workplace. And data analytics is done by a select set of team members. Besides, insights are only shared within a limited set of executives.
Would everyone embrace the insights positively?
Chances are other stakeholders will feel alienated with regard to decision-making and pursuit of strategic goals.
A solid data analytics strategy requires cooperation and support from all the key stakeholders (including those ones at the bottom of the hierarchy).
The analytics team should be focused on answering the right questions for the business. And the resulting data story should be shared widely to attract support.
Data analytics is not a blue magic pill or kool-aid that produces results instantly.
In other words, the return on investment (ROI) is not immediate. You’ve got to trust the process to enjoy fruits at the end. Some business owners are likely to lose patience and trust with business data analytics due to the time it takes to develop fully.
You need a substantial amount of data to draw actionable insights. However, the process can take longer than necessary.
Let’s agree on this.
Don’t pull the plug on your data analytics project because of a lack of results in the first few months.
One of the challenges of the business analytics field is the lack of access to quality and clean data.
Bad data can easily distort the insights and result in disastrous decision-making.
You may have access to gigantic amounts of raw data, but do you have the right data? If the data quality is poor, the decisions made will be distorted and misleading. Fix the quality of the data before drawing meaningful conclusions.
The tools you choose to work with can decide whether you enjoy the benefits of data analytics or not.
Google Sheets is one of the trusted data visualization tools within analytics circles. You can use the spreadsheet tool’s graphs and charts to visualize your data. But Google Sheets has very basic graphs that require a lot of work and time in tweaks and edits.
To create a compelling data story, you need charts that are easy to interpret. So you’ve got to think beyond Google Sheets to succeed in business analytics.
We suggest you supercharge your Google Sheets with third-party applications (add-ons) to access:
The add-in we’ve tested and has provided remarkable results is ChartExpo.
ChartExpo is an add-on you can easily install in your Google Sheets to access insightful, ready-made, and visually-appealing charts.
Unlike other data visualization-based add-ons, ChartExpo does not require coding or programming skills.
Furthermore, it has a super-friendly user interface for everyone, irrespective of their computer skills. Secondly, it has over 50 ready-to-use charts you’ll never find in your Google Sheets.
ChartExpo produces charts that are incredibly easy to read and understand. Another thing we’ve noted with this tool is that it does not slow your browser down.
Let’s visualize the data below using ChartExpo
| Questions | Rating | Response |
| How easy is it to use our product? | 1 | 324 |
| How easy is it to use our product? | 2 | 176 |
| How easy is it to use our product? | 3 | 230 |
| How easy is it to use our product? | 4 | 130 |
| How easy is it to use our product? | 5 | 200 |
| How would you rate the value for money? | 1 | 138 |
| How would you rate the value for money? | 2 | 186 |
| How would you rate the value for money? | 3 | 176 |
| How would you rate the value for money? | 4 | 230 |
| How would you rate the value for money? | 5 | 270 |
| How likely are you to recommend this product to others? | 1 | 50 |
| How likely are you to recommend this product to others? | 2 | 138 |
| How likely are you to recommend this product to others? | 3 | 186 |
| How likely are you to recommend this product to others? | 4 | 176 |
| How likely are you to recommend this product to others? | 5 | 500 |
| How can we improve our product to meet your needs better? | 1 | 95 |
| How can we improve our product to meet your needs better? | 2 | 220 |
| How can we improve our product to meet your needs better? | 3 | 49 |
| How can we improve our product to meet your needs better? | 4 | 99 |
| How can we improve our product to meet your needs better? | 5 | 176 |
| Are other types of people like you who could find our product useful? | 1 | 330 |
| Are other types of people like you who could find our product useful? | 2 | 160 |
| Are other types of people like you who could find our product useful? | 3 | 200 |
| Are other types of people like you who could find our product useful? | 4 | 138 |
| Are other types of people like you who could find our product useful? | 5 | 186 |
Note how it’s challenging to draw meaningful insights from the tabular data (above).
You can install ChartExpo For Google Sheets and then follow the following steps:
Business analytics is a process of investigating raw data with the goal of drawing meaningful insights.
The field of data analytics is advancing to new heights at an unprecedented scale due to emerging systems, such as machine learning algorithms.
There’re 4 types of business analytics, namely:
Business analytics refers to taking in and processing historical commercial data with the goal of extracting meaningful conclusions. There are a plethora of charts in data analytics that can help you identify trends, patterns, and outliers in your data.
You can use insights to optimize a process for optimum performance.
Data is increasingly becoming the determiner between the winner and loser in the current economic landscape. Besides, the benefits of data analytics are innumerable, but we’ll mention a few significant ones.
The critical role of business analytics is to help you create a compelling story from raw data using an array of tools and methodologies, such as visualization.
One of the benefits of data analytics is the fact that it supports decision-making processes in business. Also, you can use data to personalize marketing messages and develop targeted offers in your business.
Google Sheets (one of the go-to tools for most professionals and business owners) has pretty basic data visualization designs, which require a lot of editing.
In other words, you stand to spend a lot of time visualizing your data using this spreadsheet tool.
We recommend our readers to use the ChartExpo add-on to supercharge their Google Sheets.
ChartExpo has over 50 ready-made, insightful, and visually appealing charts. Besides, it has an intuitive interface, which means you don’t need coding or programming skills to visualize your data.
Sign up for ChartExpo today to enjoy the unlimited benefits of analytics.
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