In the business world, data can be your most important asset when it comes to making smart decisions about your company’s future. If you want to be able to use this data effectively in order to make informed decisions, it’s critical that you know how to:
– Accelerate digital growth
– Enable an automated and reliable process
– Ensure sense-and-respond capabilities
Perhaps, data and analytics (D&A) is increasingly seen as a key enabler for dealing with current business challenges, as well as a means to address future opportunities. Data and Analytics (D&A) leaders need to support their organization with high-quality, trusted data to enable decision making from the boardroom to operations.
The following six steps will help you take your business from good to great.
Review Your Data Infrastructure
It doesn’t matter how clean and organized your data is if only the engineers that currently work on the product can retrieve it. In this case, reports tend to take weeks. According to Broadcom’s research on the state of Big Data Framework, over half of respondents have already implemented Big Data projects and 29% are planning to begin executing them. Meaning, if your goal is a data-driven company, you need to build an infrastructure where everybody within the company has access to a specific data network and can analyze it.
How do you ensure data readiness? You need a well-thought-out data strategy and a clear understanding of how this data will be handled. Security requirements and security policies should continuously come first during the project and the implementation stage of the data strategy.
There are five areas to focus on:
- Define your data infrastructure strategy: Have a clear plan of where you are going to store your data
- Clean data and optimize data quality: Be prepared to not only collect clean data
- Choose a repository to collect data: How you want the information to be presented
- Take care of data governance: This gives data value
- Build an ETL pipeline: Considerate requests for analysis of new information and create your pipeline for complicated data challenges
Make Sure You Have The Right Tools in Place
The right data architecture is the spine of a technically up-to-date BI platform. Here you have a choice between using a data lake or data warehouse as your accessible solution. So, what are the differences between them, and should you employ only one of the alternatives or explore a hybrid arrangement? Earlier, when the amount of data wasn’t as huge as it is presently, data warehouses were the definitive solution to data storage.
This was because it didn’t take data engineers that much time to build a repository that met the needs of a particular commerce. In any case, when Big Data came on stage, bringing data that was exponentially developing in quantity and deteriorating quality-wise, the days of the data warehouse monopoly were doomed. That said, this doesn’t have to be an either-or choice. There’s also the alternative to go for a hybrid solution. You can keep the data with minimal business meaning in a lake while storing the useful and relevant data in a warehouse; or use a data lake to collect data and a DWH to structure it.
But keep in mind, that these stores use different technologies: data lake – NoSQL, data warehouse – SQL. So you’ve got to resolve this contradiction when deciding to build your data infrastructure.
Collect and Track The Right Data
In a world where data is always being generated, it’s essential to track and analyze this data to gather important insights. Data tracking can help you understand trends, optimize forms, and make way better decisions. By collecting data from different sources, cleaning and organizing it, and inferring insights, you’ll make better choices that lead to improved results. Data tracking is nothing new. With free tools like Google Analytics and data tracking integrated into CMS, each company can track data. However, deriving insights from data tracking is different, more complex, and requires a strategy.
Tracking the right data has a lot of benefits, here are a few:
- Helps you understand your audience better which helps improve marketing strategies
- Helps you see where traffic is coming from to target better your audience
- Helps you measure the success of marketing strategies by providing insights about how costumers interact with the brand
- Helps identify where businesses are losing costumers and make changes to improve it
A point by point and well-documented tracking plan is the key to your analytics and data success. If you don’t have a plan, things like data bugs can ruin everything. That often leads to your group using data less, which means tracking can become less critical and abandoned.
Analyze Your Data
After collecting data, knowing how to analyze it is critical, since this analysis will show many insights and answers to questions about why and how customers are acting a certain way, as mentioned above. While data analysis in qualitative research can incorporate statistical procedures, many times analysis gets to be a continuous iterative handle where data is continuously collected and analyzed nearly simultaneously.
Indeed, researchers generally analyze for patterns in observations through the whole data collection stage.The form of the analysis is determined by the particular qualitative approach taken (field study, ethnography content analysis, verbal history, biography, subtle research) and the form of the information (field notes, documents, audiotape, videotape).
Use Your Data to Improve Your Digital Marketing Efforts
Marketing analytics and data are playing a larger and bigger part in strategizing your way forward as a business. No matter what industry you’re in or your commerce size, data is impacting how you work and your marketing strategy. The modern consumer journey requires data to know where your consumers are coming from, what is generating leads, what data is resounding with them, and what a normal buying cycle is like for your company. Somebody sees a post on Facebook, follows you on Instagram and sees a unused product, reads your most recent blog but doesn’t buy until they see your advertisement pop up alongside another website. It’s a different kind of client journey! The client journey is now much more complex, and regularly involves multiple platforms and campaigns. Your marketing data ensures you’re following the leads and the people, not individual metrics. Many times, we can get lost within the weeds—marketers especially. The data can show you an overall picture of what’s happening along with your clients and with your user journey. It helps you explore the large picture, so you can start impactfully changing the individual parts.
A robust data infrastructure smooths the road for data science efforts. To benefit from it, you need to collect crude data, clean it, and make it accessible. Before you go mainstream and begin analyzing your data to get perceptive insights, think about who within the organization will access the data, and how it’ll be used. Structured data is more accessible and easier to interpret. A clear data infrastructure strategy is key to measurable business success.
Data analysis has a lot of benefits and helps you understand and convert your leads. If you are ready to apply these services to your company, we are what you are looking for. You can get in touch with us at alliedglobal.com and get more information