Many leaders talk about the importance of making data-driven decisions, but that doesn’t mean acting on raw data alone. What this actually means is that in order to make data-driven decisions, you need to transform data into relevant insights, or in other words, to extract value from raw data. This will allow you to
The difference between data and insights, however, is that data is any information you get from any source, while insights represent the findings you generate after analyzing and contextualizing that data. Alone, data doesn’t mean much, but when put into perspective and analyzed, it creates valuable insights that will allow you to
Here’s how you can turn data into actionable insights to ignite business growth.
Identify and Collect the Right Data
You can only generate detailed insights if your data sources are relevant, valid, and specific to your goals. After all, you can’t optimize your strategies if the data you collect is not relevant to your brand, processes, your customers, or your market.
There are many potential data pools you can tap into, so it’s important to identify the data sources you need to drive sales, marketing, and support forward. For an Ecommerce business, for example, this means:
- Identifying the sales touchpoints that generate the most conversions
- Analyzing customer behavior on your site
- Learning which products perform better than others
- Learning which landing pages perform best and which should be improved
- Learning what devices to people use the most to purchase your products
Recognize Patterns
Analyzing your data and putting it into perspective means recognizing and creating patterns that could benefit your business and teams. That said, not all patterns you observe will be relevant to you, so it’s important to then analyze the patterns to ascertain their value and relevance.
To start observing and creating patterns, you will need to:
- Know what patterns to look for
- Organize the data into tiers
- Question the data and ask yourself if pieces are missing
- Visualize the data
- Let new ideas emerge from the data
To achieve all this, however, you’ll need to collect and organize data from the right sources.
Collate Data from Different Sources
There is a lot of data flowing around nowadays, and your teams can get overwhelmed by the sheer number of data sources at their disposal. It’s important to collate all the data in a centralized system so that you can start creating detailed reports and insights. To do this, you’ll need a CRM (customer relationship management) system where you can organize all your data.
If you’re wondering “what is a CRM”, a CRM is a type of business software used to manage all your interactions with your customers and prospects. You can store vast amounts of marketing, support, and sales data in your CRM from many different sources like email, website traffic, social media, and many more.
Once you have all your data sources in one place, you can start visualizing and communicating that data to your teams.
Communicate and Visualize Your Insights
To empower your teams and deliver relevant data to relevant departments, it’s important to visualize it and communicate it through visual reports. Sharing visual dashboards with team-specific highlights is a great way to communicate relevant data to your employees and give them the information they need to adapt and build new, data-driven strategies.
This will also help reduce meetings and increase productivity, allowing everyone to get to work faster. You can also make these visual dashboards easily accessible to all your teams and allow seamless collaboration in your CRM, which will break department silos and inspire teamwork.
Use Insights to Outline Action Plans
Finally, once you have created the reports and have verified your insights, it’s time to put that knowledge to use. Start by using your insights to create new goals for your teams that are realistic and attainable within a specific timeframe.
Actionable insights will allow your teams to stay flexible as well, and adapt their approach quickly as the consumer trends continue to evolve. Another great thing about insight-driven plans is that you can keep optimizing them over time to achieve incrementally better results. This will lead to stable business growth and will minimize setbacks, as you will have all the necessary information at your disposal to make good decisions for your business.
Wrapping Up
Business growth comes from smart and strategic decision-making, which requires actionable insights. Only by turning data into insights will you be able to gain a strategic overview of your sales, marketing, and other efforts, and create a winning long-term plan.
Use these tips to start making data-driven decisions and empower your teams to push your business forward in 2022.