Today’s businesses run on data. By using data analytics, you can leverage the power of data to gain insights into customer behavior, streamline your internal operations, and make better business decisions.

Raw data on its own is essentially meaningless. Without running an analysis on your data, it’s impossible to draw conclusions or make effective business decisions.

Lotame notes that data analytics refers to the processing of raw data to uncover patterns and extract meaning. Typically, this involves running data through specialized software and machine learning algorithms. Thanks to digital tools like these, you no longer have to be a data scientist to derive meaning from complex data sets.

Check out this article from Unidigital to learn why you should care about data analytics!

Improve Financial Management

Data analysis will allow you to optimize your accounting systems to maintain steady cash flow. This is vital to accurate financial forecasting. Based on your previous financial performance, financial forecasting estimates your future income and revenue so you can tell whether or not you’re headed in the right direction. Data analytics can also help you uncover bottlenecks in your invoicing process or identify issues causing clients to delay payment. The right cloud accounting software will include important data analysis features so you can manage your money more effectively. 

Increase Customer Acquisition and Retention

Data analytics can also help you acquire and retain more customers. Smile.io explains that using data to drive your customer acquisition strategies can help cut down on costs and turn more first-time shoppers into loyal, long-term customers. For example, you can analyze data on your target audience to determine what they like and dislike.

You can also use data to segment your audience based on their predicted value to your business, so you can put more resources towards customers who are likely to stick around. Analyzing data from your website or CRM software can help you find these customer niches. By studying the various kinds of customers and their interactions with your business, you can market more effectively and increase sales.

Boost Marketing ROI, Including Working with PDFs

Marketing is likely one of your biggest business costs. Thankfully, data analytics can help you increase the ROI of your marketing campaigns so you can spend less money for better results. For example, data analytics can help you decide which platforms to use for marketing, the time of day your campaigns will receive the most engagement, your audience’s preferred method of communication, and how often your customers want to receive emails from you.

When working with a graphic designer or web designer about your marketing ideas, you may want to share images from PDFs as JPGs. Fortunately, you can easily create a PDF of a JPG on your Mac online with a web tool in four quick steps. Once formatted and saved, this makes it easier to share or edit image files while maintaining an image’s quality.

Reduce Business Risks

Data is also valuable for protecting your company from fraud, employee turnover, wasted resources, and other risks. For example, Spiceworks explains that applying predictive analytics to potential employees can help you forecast employee churn so you can spend less money onboarding and training new staff members. In the same way, you can use data analytics to evaluate new business locations before risking a large investment that might not pay off.

Optimize Inventory Management

Inventory management issues can cost your business severely. Stockouts, for example, can negatively affect your profits and lead to backorders which can frustrate your customers. Holding excess inventory, on the other hand, ties up your working capital and creates extra storage costs. Your inventory might even go obsolete if it sits around too long. Good inventory forecasting is essential for avoiding these issues.

To successfully forecast your inventory needs, you need to know how long it takes to replenish your inventory, at what point you need to reorder more stock, and how much to order when you reach that point. You can automate all of these calculations through an advanced inventory management system that leverages data analytics. 

You can even go a step further with business process management (BPM), which can be used to automate any number of complex processes within your organization. Understanding BPM and what it can do for your business means that you can spend less time trying to solve complex issues. Its machine learning and artificial intelligence tools can go under the hood of your systems, building a model that it uses to automate and manage them, increasing both speed and efficiency.

Data analytics can benefit all areas of your business, from marketing to inventory management. Don’t overlook the power of data when making business decisions. Whether you’re deciding what social media platforms to use or how much inventory to order, data analytics will point you in the right direction.

As a specialist business consultancy service, Unidigital empowers businesses to access the most efficient, valuable and suitable technology. Reach out today to find out more!

Tina Martin

Contributor

Tina Martin stays busy as a life coach and works hard to help herself and her clients achieve a healthy work-life balance. She is also working on her first book, Ideaspired: Put Your Ideas, Your Inspiration, and Yourself First to Make Your Dreams Come True. She also started ideaspired.com as a side project to reach as many people as possible, and encourage them to put their dreams first.