Analytics for Business
What is Analytics ?
To understand how analytics can be used for business, let’s define analytics first.
Analytics is the process of discovery, interpretation, communication of meaningful patterns in data and applying those patterns towards effective decision making.
The fuel for analytics is data and today, data is more accessible than ever. Organisations have more data at their disposal and they treat it as assets. There are constant efforts from these companies to actively look for ways to turn insights from data into a competitive advantage.
How analytics helps business? Analytics helps business by studying the past, predicting the future and prescribing for it. It helps management to make informed decisions.
Analytics are majorly of four types :
- Descriptive Analytics – What happened? It is the first level of analytics where the historical data is analysed and summarised using statistical measures.
- Diagnostic Analytics – Why did it happen? It is a deeper drill-down into the data to understand the reasons for occurrence of the behaviour and events.
- Predictive Analytics – What probably will happen? Understanding the causes, a model is prepared to predict what can happen in the unknown future.
- Prescriptive Analytics – How can we make it happen? It is an area where the best course of action to achieve the desired outcome is prescribed.
Revenues forecasts for Big Data & Business Analytics Solutions to grow by 12% (Source IDC).
7 Ways to use Analytics for Business
- Business Growth and Expansion Planning
- Forecast Trends
- Target the Right Audience
- Develop Efficient Marketing Campaigns
- Product Development
- Targeted Content
- Operational Efficiency
We at Leotics Consulting, provide analytics services that can help you achieve the said objectives.
With data and analytical techniques, we create models that help the businesses to achieve their objectives. We create metrics to monitor the business performances. These models & metrics are created using machine learning, artificial intelligence and/or advanced analytics. These help in generating richer insights, greater accuracy and therefore helps the business to take the right decision in time.
With a combination of these models and insights, we suggest the right strategy for the business to achieve their goals. We help businesses to take data driven decisions and data driven marketing.
Business Growth & Expansion Planning
If you plan to open an outlet, branch, store or office in a new location, then it is possible by means of using your internal data also. As a business you would have a ton of information about growing customer base, employees, distribution network etc.
The right visualisations and dashboards will show you from where to start your research and your key areas to focus on. In-fact, today with data coming in real time, you can interact with the results and use that information in your expansion plans.
Using analytical techniques you can figure out the causes or reasons impacting your sales and then focus on them to scale/grow your business further seamlessly.
Forecast Trends
On the basis of historical data you can analyse trends and find the causes and driving factors. These then can be further used to forecast future trends, sales, growth etc. This can help businesses in setting sales targets, drive research and development and future business plans.
Target the Right Audience
Targeting the correct audience is of utmost importance for any business. The marketing spends on wrong audience is going to have no yield. Using social media analytics and we analytics you can figure out the correct target audience, target them precisely and measure outcomes. With analytics, we can even measure the fruitfulness of the target audience and customer lifetime value.
Develop Efficient Marketing Campaigns
Studying previous marketing campaigns and engagements, we can analyse the campaigns use insights in the following campaigns. This will help reduce errors and help target effectively and efficiently. Using different analytical techniques we can optimise the campaigns and increase return on investment. We can deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time.
Product Development
Analytics enables both prediction and knowledge discovery capabilities. It helps in understanding the current state of business and predict future trends and outcomes. It helps to predict the future needs and requirements of the business as well as customers.
Targeted Content
Being able to know what the customers might want before hand can help create marketing campaigns more customer oriented and engaging. It enables businesses to customise their communication content to increase engagements form the target audience.
Operational Efficiency
Analytics can help in identifying potential opportunities to streamline operations and maximise profits. It can predict failures or breakdowns or other problems before they occur, thus helping to take prevention measures well in advance. It can compare multiple processes and measure efficiency of output, default areas, error prone zones etc.
4 Reasons Why Analytics Fails for Business
A number of analytics projects fail or do not deliver as desired, here we analyse the reasons for which it happens:
- Lack of Clear Vision
- Data Quality
- Analytics Model Limitations Unchecked
- Shortage of Talent
Lack of Clear Vision
Management in a number of occasions give too broad objectives or are not sure what exactly can be delivered by advanced analytics. Analytics is assumed to be a technology project or something to do with data and databases but it is not the case. Analytics has to do more with prediction of future strategies and support decision making.
Data Quality
Data quality is the primary issue for the failure of analytics projects. Data is the foundation for analytics. It is most crucial to ensure data quality. If the data is faulty or forged then all the predictions and insights will be flawed. This can lead to business making the wrong decision and thereby wasting its valuable resources.
Analytics Model Limitations Unchecked
Analytics models and techniques have their own limitations. In due course of practise these things get neglected and which eventually leads to the model either not being able to deliver the desired results or not being able to deliver at all.
Shortage of Talent
There is a shortage of talent when it comes to finding people who can successfully run an analytics project. The field of analytics is relatively new so the pool of skilled analytics experts is shallow.
6 Analytics Tools for Business
Here we list down 6 most widely used tools for analytics and few features of them.
R is a popular programming language and tool used for data analytics and visualisation. It is free and open source. It is widely used for statistical modeling and machine learning. R also provides tools to automatically install all packages as per user requirement, which can also be well assembled with Big data.
Python is an object oriented scripting language. It is easy to learn and very similar to JavaScript and PHP. It is open source and free tool, suitable for handling data and machine learning. Python supports both structured and functional programming methods.
Tableau Public is another free software that can connect all kinds of data source like Excel, Data Warehouse or Web-Based Data. It is a tool for business intelligence tool that creates graphs, maps and dashboards with real-time updates that can be shared on social media too.
SAS is a leading analytics tool and programming language for data manipulation. It can easily access, manage and analyse data from any source. It is capable of predicting behaviors of customers and prospects along with recommending optimized communication models.
Excel is the most widely used tool for data manipulation and analytics across all the industries. You use R, Tableau or Sas or any other tool, somewhere they all use excel. It is best in filtering and manipulating data. It has an advance business analytics option which helps in modelling.
Google Analytics is a free tool which is used mostly for website traffic. It provides detailed reports about the web traffic from the source of origin to the behaviour on the web pages. It is a widely used tool to understand how the content is interacting with the traffic.
We at Leotics Consulting LLP, offer analytics, consulting, digital marketing and research services that can help your business in the above said ways. You can surely connect with us and see how can analytics and our other services benefit your business.
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