Transform Your Data into Actionable Insights

Even if you have access to an infinite amount of data, it will not help you if you cannot use it to guide decisions that will result in observable changes. Significant growth of data has led to a higher demand for skilled marketers to convert data into valuable insights. Building the link between data and insights is an exciting challenge.

What is “actionable insights”?

Actionable insight is the analysis of data that can facilitate our decision making. For instance, company management may monitor a ’customer’s actions on a platform to determine how they feel about a product by looking at how they respond to specific prompts.

You can analyse data using various analytical tools to provide information upon which you may act. For example, a food outlet may decide to remove an item from its menu and replace with added items that may result in better sales. Recognise that there may be other contributing factors before making decisions.

Using web scraping techniques, you can gather views from various social media platforms to generate insights.

What are the advantages of data insights?

Your data-driven marketing ’strategy’s success depends on your ability to extract actionable insights from your analytics. The following are additional advantages that your company may derive from having access to actionable insights:

Improve decision-making

Decision making is a moving constant, and the outcomes of these decisions may significantly impact your work. Your intuition, backed by correct knowledge, accurate data, and actionable insights, will improve your decision-making. For example, your gut feeling tells you that a particular manufacturing process may result in a lower profit margin. If this said process is measured and quantified, it will prove or disprove your intuition. From the information, you can then make the necessary corrections.

Assist in directing the successful execution of your marketing initiatives

The appropriate marketing approach is essential to generate a greater return on investment (ROI) for a lesser cost. You can translate insights into action to assist you in monitoring the success of your various marketing initiatives.

You can investigate the weaknesses and strengths of your campaigns and then direct your financial resources toward the channels producing the highest quality leads and sales.

Improve customers’ experience

How do you manage customers’ feedback? Do you respond on piecemeal basis, or do you try to find a trend? Using various analytics to extract crucial key words or data, you will be able to detect a negative pattern that, if resolved, can improve your interactions with customer, which may boost customer retention and your future business growth.

Methods to Transform Data into Actionable Insights?

Turning data into actionable action may be challenging but with the correct tools, goals, and procedures, you can construct a bridge between the analytics data you collect and the crucial insights you gain from those analytics.

The following are suggestions that should get the ball rolling:

Define both your short-term and long-term goals

Create a plan for your goals and objectives to gain actionable insights. It is a waste of time to keep track of data and form conclusions from that data if the findings will not bring you closer to achieving your goals. The correct data drives actionable insights.

Focus on data that is important to your goals and objectives. There are indicators that are vanity metrics since they seem great and appear excellent on paper, but they contribute little value to your company.

Invest in actionable data tools

Selecting the appropriate data analytics technology is necessary to transform vast amounts of data into practical action. As there many analytics software and tools, it can be difficult to determine which one is the most appropriate for your company.

Citing Google Analytics as an example. Marketers turn to Google Analytics to collect, monitor, and analyse data. Google Analytics can establish where people are coming from and how they discovered your website, but it cannot put that information into action. For instance, according to Google Analytics, your Google Ad and your Facebook campaigns generated fifty leads each during the previous month. Unfortunately, you can determine which campaign generate more revenue.

Minimise wholesale changes to existing workflows

What ways will your users be able to incorporate your analytics system into their regular routines? As widespread acceptance is necessary for your business intelligence or analytics product to have the most impact, you should consider how to incorporate this into your existing activities without adding workload to your staff.

Additionally, be conscious of the differences between your operational and business intelligence systems and concentrate on the positive aspects.

Your analytics platform should give insights that assist your users in making better decisions; nevertheless, it is not the appropriate location for your users to examine and update individual data or take actions based on those insights.

Work smarter, not harder, and try to capitalise on the advantages offered by each system.

Assess your ’platform’s users

Who are the end-users in your business who will be consuming these insights, and what behaviour do you anticipate them doing as a direct result of receiving them? It is vital to guarantee that the expected monetary impact will be reachable consistently with expectations.

C-level executives may be solely concerned with the overall picture, while managers are more focused on the business drivers in their respective areas. Similarly, analysts like ad hoc data exploration, but business customers want to consume the information they require. Validate your assumptions by communicating with the people who will use your Business Intelligence system in the future.

Open and consistent communication is important. Getting the buy-in of your stakeholders will increase the success of any new intended strategies. Once the project has begun, making significant alterations to your plan will be more complex and expensive.

Ask questions

Answer every ’stakeholder’s query to the best of your ability. This stage may involve investigating the goals and obstacles they have. It is not difficult to spend hours on the data and producing insights that are neither pertinent nor crucial to your ’company’s requirements. Ask the right questions and get the appropriate responses before moving on to the data analysis stage, you need to formulate specific questions first.

Start deriving insights from your data

Technology dealing with copious amounts of data is necessary to embrace digital transformation. As a result, putting the ’client’s needs first in any data analysis is essential for the company.

A unified system that can do data analysis, interpretation, and rapid and automatic action-taking will help decision-making. This procedure will assist you in making educated decisions that will increase the productivity of your business.

Every tactic detailed in this article has the potential to assist you in refining your action plan for turning data into insights for the benefit of your company.

You can try techniques to zero in on the most effective one for your company. You would also need a Business Intelligence solution to assist you in implementing a data-driven culture throughout your whole organisation and align everyone on a sole source of truth to succeed.

This blog is a collaborative effort with Hybrid Analytica Consulting.