Analyzing the vast amount of data generated by your company can tell you a lot about you company’s performance.
However, that process can be daunting when you aren’t approaching it with the right tools in hand.
Fortunately, if you’re using the right business intelligence (BI) tools, they can reduce the amount of stress and time put in to the data analysis process.
Specifically, BI tools are those which help with the collection, analysis, and integration of data. And BI tends to focus on reporting historical trends, revealing what might or might not have been effective in the pasta and BI reporting tends to focus on reporting historical trends, revealing what might or might not have been effective in the past.
Having access to this data can actionably benefit your company in the following three ways.
Gain a deeper understanding of your financial data
With finance departments in charge of crunching numbers and projecting growth, they are in a position to easily harness useful data. Specifically, utilizing a business intelligence platform empowers financial analysts in a meaningful, giving them more control over how they utilize such data.
Some key ways BI can be used to express financial data include:
- Analytics – BI’s ability to surface patterns in data allows users to see how vital areas of their company are performing.
- Forecasting – Analyzing data from the past and present can allow insight into how the company will continue to perform in the future. With this data at hand, financial planners can make more informed decisions on how to increase success in future scenarios.
- Visualization – Being able to visualize data through the creation of dashboards, charts, and graphs makes it easier for the finance department to communicate their findings in a corporate setting.
Furthermore, with BI’s ability to reveal historical trends, it is easy to compare your current financial standing to that of the past. Doing so can help you identify key performance indicators and create plans with these indicators in mind.
Yield better advertising outcomes
Similar to how BI features benefit business financials, the same data analysis tools used to underscore financial trends can also be used to develop insight into the marketing sector.
For example, you can observe the effect advertising campaigns have had on the popularity of a product. Rather than risk wasting time and money developing uncertain campaigns, you can utilize your data to develop advertisements that will best reach your target audience.
The visualization of data created by BI programs can also be used to boost your advertising techniques. With visual content being 40 times more likely to be shared on social media, presenting data in the form of images, gifs, and infographics can increase product exposure. Plus, consumers are often positively swayed by numbers that reflect a positive outcome from a product.
Understand how customers feel about your core services
Gaining experience in the area of customer service takes time to acquire – time that start-ups can’t afford to waste. Pursuing BI applications with customer relationship management (CRM) features can generate quicker insights into practices that form better customer relationships.
Some CRM capabilities include tracking customers and providing after-sales services. Utilizing these capabilities provides you with a view of how customers have reacted to your services in the past.
Focusing on the practices that have proven to have had positive outcomes alleviates the stress that can come from the trial-and-error of customer interactions.
Final thoughts
The data being constantly produced and stored by your company offers great potential insight into your past and present standing. More specifically, utilizing BI tools to analyze this data allows you to clearly visualize trends and leads to a more informed approach into the future.
Overall, analyzing data through BI allows you to optimize your company’s processes in a variety of sectors. Whether you use this data to generate new ad campaign ideas, forecast your financial future, or better interact with customers, you will receive the benefits that come from making well-informed business decisions.
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