Data analytics is booming thanks to ever-evolving technology and tools. With the World Economic Forum reporting that "data analyst" is one of eight jobs that every company will be hiring for in 2022, businesses of all sizes and types are incorporating data analytics into their business planning.
Data analytics is the process of using raw data to answer business questions that often include: What's the market size for this product or service? Who's the target audience for it? What marketing tactics is my audience responding to?
While big business has automated much of this, startups and SMEs are often very hands-on, using tools most are familiar with already - Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Excel and Google sheets, or just do nothing.
Find out why data analytics is an important part of creating and running a successful SME or Startup.
What is Data Analytics
Data analytics helps give businesses the facts needed to make decisions. It can spot trends, reveal hidden opportunities, or help explain problems.
"Data isn’t units of information. Data is a story about human behavior - about real people's wants, needs, goals and fears. Never let the numbers, platforms, charts and methodologies cloud your vision. Our real job with data is to better understand these very human stories, so we can better serve these people. Every goal your business has is directly tied to your success in understanding and serving people." says Daniel Burstein.
For Founder and CEO of Model9, Gil Peleg, it is a no-brainer, ""Banks, insurance and healthcare companies all have decades of historical, transactional customer data stored on their mainframe. Mining that data can deliver great value and be used to develop predictive models by analyzing customer behavior in order to offer new, tailor-made solutions, and anticipate customer needs. It has therefore become a strategic priority for visionary business leaders to unlock data and integrate it with cloud-based BI and analytic tools."
Data tools that SMEs use
When it comes to tools, don't overthink it.
“The whole world runs on Excel. Name a data-intensive critical industry: deep-sea oil drilling? Power grid management? International finance? All powered by Excel at critical junctures.” ng12 on HackerNews.
Many companies, including Public Data Works, rely on data visualisation tools and data processing tools like Wrgl. Wrgl is similar to Git, but specializes in comparing CSVs and detecting changes to the CSVs. Unlike Git, behind each Wrgl commit is a single CSV table. This allows Wrgl to compute changes down to the cell level. Wrgl is also open-sourced and has its own data visualisation capability.
At kimbocorp, we use zapier to automatically transfer information from online customer forms to trello, paperforms and excel spreadsheets, so that we can assign different content to customers for specific marketing tacktics.
The tools you'll use depend on what you need to research and assess, so start, but don't stop there. As Khoi Pham from Wrgl will say, "What doesn't get measured never grows."