The Relevancy of Analytics Insights to Your Company Today: A Practical Guide

‍Practical hints on how companies can set goals, track impact, invest time, and build their analytics capacity.

Companies today face a consistent and groundbreaking storm of digital and business challenges on their road to thriving in the 21st century.

However, there is a lack of talent across multiple industries to leverage this opportunity effectively.

To address this challenge, companies today must leverage data analytics as the foundation for their digital and business strategy because an effective analytics strategy for businesses today has the potential to drive customer engagement and trust through powerful insights based on historical performance and best practices.

But how should an organization set goals, track impact, invest time, and build its team? I will share here today my experience working in the field in great companies like HP, IBM, and the Volvo Group. But first, let’s cover the basics:

What is analytics?

Analytics is the process of examining data to gain actionable insights. It is a critical piece of the business intelligence puzzle but is often over-generalized.

Analytics is often the starting point for collecting and analyzing data for critical business decisions and insights but is not the end of the business intelligence process.

Business intelligence is extracting data from various sources, cleaning and normalizing that data, building analytics models, and distributing those insights to stakeholders.

Analytics transforms data into insights that enable better decision-making and result in better outcomes for an organization. In a world with billions of data points, analytics can help you make sense of it, organize it, and deliver it in a way that makes it actionable.

An effective analytics strategy will provide a thorough picture of your organization’s performance across all channels, including your website, social media, email marketing campaigns, and more.

Why is analytics important?

Analytics is critical for business today because it drives the customer journey. Businesses attempting to sell products or services without understanding their customers struggle to develop strong relationships.

The customer journey is complex, and every touchpoint along the way is an opportunity for companies to establish trust and drive conversions. That’s where analytics come into play.

Analyzing your customer’s journey will help you understand the pain points, what triggers a purchase, and how you can improve your products and services to increase sales.

In addition, analytics can help you identify segments of your customers that are most valuable, providing insight into your buyer personas. This information is critical for designing an effective marketing strategy and building a sales strategy that is targeted and relevant to your customers.

How to set goals for a business analytics initiative

Analytics, like most business initiatives, should be tied to goals. Therefore, it is important to look at the goals of your business and tie them back to what you want to achieve with analytics.

While there are a variety of goals businesses should be setting, I have narrowed it down to three that are critical to driving success in digital analytics.

Business Goals: What are the strategic goals of your company? How will analytics help you reach those goals?

Customer Goals: What are the goals of your most valuable customers? How will analytics help you reach those goals?

Organizational Goals: What are your goals as an organization to support your business goals? How will analytics help you reach those goals?

These goals will help you align your analytics strategy to the larger business objectives and provide a framework for setting goals for your analytics team.

How to build an effective analytics team

While there are many ways to slice the analytics pie, I believe only two types of analytics matter for businesses today: marketing and business analytics.

Marketing analytics focus on the customer journey, including where people are clicking away from your website, where they are dropping off in the sales funnel, and which customers are converting.

Therefore, a marketing analytics team can focus on understanding your customer journey and improving your online presence through SEO/SEM, content marketing, paid advertising, email marketing, and more.

The team should be focused on driving leads from your website through your sales funnel, specifically focusing on how customers are dropping off in the journey or where they are clicking away from your website.

Business analytics focuses on operations, including inventory management, cash flow, revenue, and customer service.

Therefore, a business analytics team should be focused on your core data, including revenue, inventory, and cash flow. This team can also be helpful for your marketing analytics team, especially with data around your website and operations.

Tracking progress on your business analytics strategy

Your analytics strategy will look very different from month to month. As you work to improve your analytics program, you will be able to measure results and determine what is working and what is not working. With that information, you can iterate on your current strategy and make adjustments to improve over time.

There are many ways to track your progress on your analytics strategy. One way is to track the activities your core analytics teams are focused on each month. You can also track the number of leads you are receiving and converting, the number of customers you are acquiring, and the retention rate of those customers.

The key is to find a way to track your progress that makes sense for your organization and allows you to make adjustments and pivots as needed.

Invest time in data analysis and keep iterating

As you work to implement your business analytics strategy, you will want to spend time upfront looking at your core data and testing assumptions on what can be measured.

While it is important to spend the time upfront to do the proper analysis and set up your data, you will want to regularly look at your data and test assumptions based on new data.

As you work to implement your analytics strategy, you will want to keep in mind what insights are most important for your organization and what data is most critical to collect. Be sure to invest in the right data and keep it updated regularly. If a piece of data is not important to your organization, do not collect it.

Every bit of data you collect is costing you money. Data analysis should be a continuous process beyond your data collection efforts. It should be an ongoing process that occurs every day.

Develop an inclusive culture

Data is generated by everyone, not just the analytics team. To develop an effective analytics team and overall culture of data analysis, you must ensure that your team members feel comfortable sharing data. That means encouraging employees from all departments to provide data and insights that can be used in your overall analytics strategy.

To accomplish this, your team leaders must be transparent about the data they are collecting, how they use it, and how it is distributed.

They must also be transparent with how they set goals around analytics, how the team solves those goals, and what data is used for that solution.

This transparency builds trust with your team members and ensures that data is collected from the appropriate sources based on what is most important for the organization. The more data you can access, the more insights you will be able to generate, and the better decisions you will be able to make.

Conclusion

While every business will have a different analytics strategy, building an effective analytics team is critical. While analytics is a broad topic, you cannot truly excel in analytics without focusing on the right things.

Your analytics team should be focused on your core data, specifically revenue, inventory, and cash flow.

Your analytics team should also be focused on your marketing analytics team to help them do a better job by providing data on metrics that can be used to run site performance and marketing campaigns.

Finally, your analytics team should be focused on your business analytics team to help them do a better job by providing data on metrics that can be used to run operations and make decisions.

Links, resources, and References

• How to Measure the Success of Your Branding Efforts. https://bettermarketing.pub/how-to-measure-the-success-of-your-branding-efforts-91fcdac2805d
• How to fix a leaky sales funnel — The Close Sales Blog. https://blog.close.com/leaky-sales-funnel/
• A Researcher’s Guide to Dashboards | Norstat Österreich. https://norstat.at/angebot/sample-only/a-researchers-guide-to-dashboards
• What is Business Analytics | Wake Forest University. https://business.wfu.edu/masters-in-business-analytics/articles/what-is-analytics/
• What is Data Analytics | Oracle. https://www.oracle.com/business-analytics/data-analytics/