Data Management: How to Use Software to Organize and Analyze Your Business Data

Why gather and analyze business data?

Let’s start with a short explanation of what data management actually is. The term means gathering, organizing, and storing data so that it can be analyzed for making business decisions. This brings us to data analysis - a subset of data analytics that involves collecting, cleaning, analyzing, and interpreting massive amounts of data to find patterns and other insights. A thorough data analysis also includes all the tools and techniques, as well as the software to communicate the results, such as data visualization tools.

Why can data analysis be a make or break for your business?

Data analysis provides relevant insights that tell businesses where to focus their efforts. It helps organizations improve products and services, enhance customer experience, and master the overall brand image. Implementing data analysis into your business model may lead to cost reduction by identifying more efficient ways of operating. You can both make better business decisions and analyze customer trends and satisfaction more successfully.

How to analyze data to improve your business performance?

Data analysis provides relevant insights that tell businesses where to focus their efforts. It helps organizations improve products and services, enhance customer experience, and master the overall brand image. Implementing data analysis into your business model may lead to cost reduction by identifying more efficient ways of operating. You can both make better business decisions and analyze customer trends and satisfaction more successfully.

How to analyze data to improve your business performance?

Now, when you know what data analysis is, time to define what steps you should take to make decisions in a data-driven way:

     1.    Define your business goals. A successful data strategy requires a clearly defined business objective. Answer the following questions: What do you want to obtain from the data? What’s the problem that you need to solve? This will help you identify what data you will need to collect. Keep in mind that your goals should be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound).

     2.    Decide how to measure goals and integrate tools for data analysis. 

     3.    Collect the data and clean it before analyzing it. The success of your analysis heavily depends on the quality of the data so make sure it is well-prepared. Cleaning usually means removing special characters, HTML tags, and duplicate records. You can collect quantitative (tags, numerical data) and qualitative (text, speech, images, videos) data. 

     4.   Analyze the data using data analytics software and tools. Data analysis tools like Google Sheets and BI tools are excellent for collecting and sharing large amounts of data. Some methods use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to automatically analyze large sets of unstructured data. Once the data is analyzed, you can draw conclusions.

     5.   Visualize the data in a way that others can read and understand. Data visualization tools help you transform the data into striking visualizations. They enable you to summarize the data to easily spot trends, patterns, and relationships. Therefore, well-prepared visualizations are a great way to back up business decisions.

     6.   Continuously monitor and optimize to ensure that the insights remain relevant and actionable. 

How to define business goals to achieve the above results from data analytics?

Defining your business goals is the first step to starting a successful data analysis. In order to do it right, you should identify your business challenges first. Those may be low sales growth or high customer churn rate. Then, you should determine the data analytics objectives your data analytics efforts will address, and identify the data sources. At this point, you can move to developing a data analytics plan. It should outline the steps needed to achieve the objectives. Once you set the SMART goals, time to finally implement the data analytics plan and use the insights gained to drive business decisions.

Handy tips for business data analysis 

     1.   Understand the difference between reporting and analytics. Reporting is a way to tell what’s happening with your business and transform the data into understandable formats. Data analysis also includes exploring and interpreting data to discover valuable insights into why things happen the way they do.
     2.   Make sure everyone understands the goals. All stakeholders should be on board so that the requirements can be understood and documented properly.
     3.   You definitely need a well-thought-out data strategy. Without such a strategy, you will risk wasting time and resources on data that doesn’t provide actionable insights.
     4.   You don’t need much money to get started. There are many tools you can experiment with before spending any money on training or upgrades. Also, in the beginning, you don’t need a dedicated team of data engineers, scientists, and analysts. It’s very likely someone from your team has the analytical skills to learn some data techniques.

One of the crucial things in making data-driven decisions is to have a robust data infrastructure. The key elements of such infrastructure are real-time data processing, machine learning models (they should be designed to adapt to changing data patterns), as well as scalable data storage such as NoSQL databases. Also, you may need data quality monitoring and data governance procedures to ensure that data is accurate, consistent, and secure. Finally, continuous improvement is key to adapting to fast-changing data. You should regularly review and refine data infrastructure to ensure that it remains effective and relevant.

Benefits of business data analysis

As you can see, gathering and analyzing business data is crucial to doing business today. The insights based on data analysis software help you:

• Target your customers better. You see where you should be focusing your advertising efforts as you get a better idea of your target audience’s spending habits, areas of interest, and disposable income. Therefore, you provide a more personalized experience.

• Reduce costs. You clearly see which areas aren’t producing and should be scaled down or eliminated.

• Solve problems better. When a decision is informed, it is more likely to be a successful decision. And to make informed decisions you need accurate data.

• Streamline operations and improve operational efficiency.

• Mitigate risk and take preventive measures. You can also use analytics to limit losses after a setback occurs.

• Enhance security. You can use data analysis to diagnose the causes of data breaches by processing and visualizing relevant information.

Organize and analyze your business data with the right software 

Various software tools can help you centralize data from different business areas and establish each area’s performance. They enable you to find out what’s working well and what to improve in order to grow. Data analysis software makes the analysis easier, faster, and more accurate – combining both qualitative and quantitative data helps businesses spot trends and truly begin to listen to the voice of their customers. The main features of data management solutions are data quality, data control, data security, and workflow automation.

What kind of data management software should you use?

Analytics and BI tools have a wide range of use cases. The software you choose should fit your needs and requirements. There are lots of tools available to work with cloud-based warehouses (they store massive amounts of data), and there are also tools designed for data modeling or software that visualizes data in diagrams and colors. While choosing the right data management tool for your organization, you should consider the following:

• Data consolidation feature. Your software should be able to consolidate data from various sources into one central repository. Data collection from heterogeneous systems should be seamless and automated.

• Data cleansing. With a data management tool, you should get support for e.g. cleaning data, resolving quality issues, removing redundancy, etc.

• User-friendly and intuitive interface. Even the non-technical staff should be able to use it when necessary.

• Scalability of features. The more rapid your business growth, the more data needs to be managed and analyzed. Your software should allow you the flexibility to quickly adapt to your business needs by offering scalable functionalities. 

What tools can be used to efficiently collect relevant data?

If you want to efficiently work with the data you collect, you should consider using some helpful tools. Below, you will find the examples:

• Web analytics tools (such as Google Analytics) that enable you to collect data on website traffic, user behavior, and conversion rates.

• CRM tools that can be used to gather data on customer interactions, purchase history, and demographic information.

• Social media analytics tools that can be used to gather data on social media engagement, audience demographics, and sentiment analysis.

• Surveys and feedback forms to collect data on customer satisfaction, user experience, as well as product feedback.

• Data mining tools to gather data from different sources and use it to identify patterns and insights that can help you make informed decisions.

• Public data sources to track market trends and get industry insights.

Of course, to make the most out of data analysis, on top of methodologies and tools you also need human factors - the right skills and competencies. The most important skills and competencies to look for in the data team are:

• Data analysis skills.

• Data visualization skills.

• Data management skills.

• Programming skills.

• Communication skills.

• Business acumen.

• Project management skills.

By looking for team members with the above-mentioned skills and competencies, you can create a powerful data team that is capable of delivering meaningful insights and driving business performance.

Do you want to start making data-driven decisions with data analysis program and software? Or learn how to properly optimize costs thanks to data analysis? You’ve come to the right place - we’ll help you collect and analyse business data, and sell effectively. 

Let’s schedule a meeting!