The Power of Analytics: Everything You Need to Know About the Importance of Data-Driven Business Decisions

By: Sabrina Tatalias

Your most valuable business tool is something you already have: Data.

Gone are the days of making entirely intuition-based business decisions at this point in time. In fact, I entirely encourage everyone not to go this route for any business decisions moving forward. The reason being is how analytics and data provide a sense of power in knowing what your users and audience desire — without having to second guess if it is the correct option to take.

Maybe your organization or team is rarely using data, not using data effectively at this time, or really don’t know where to start.

Don’t fret; I am going to dive into why analytics is important, what you’re going to get out of it, and even a few different tools and tactics I recommend bringing to your next team meeting.

Why Using Analytics Is the Difference Between Closing Shop or Growing Your Business

What in the world is analytics? Let alone, why am I always hearing this buzzword in industry reports 24/7?

Analytics essentially is sets of data that comprise reports and visuals that then can be used to obtain findings and insights. See, not too bad. Although, let’s break this down a bit.

Examples of Data you already have

Data can really be, well, anything! Here are a few examples:

• Social media engagement metrics and impressions
• Email open, click, and unsubscribe rates
• Site visitor engagement on a website or app
• Purchaser data off your point-of-sale (POS) system
• And even something as simple as survey data can be data.

The reports are anything from spreadsheets, visuals such as charts and infographics, and even beautifully made dashboards that take the data and create it into something much more easy to understand. The findings and insights really is the heart and soul of what is analytics — because we are “analyzing the data” to come up with our…