Do You Know What Business Intelligence Means?

As your business grows and expands, you will begin to have access to a more extensive client base and operational reach, and with that comes new strategies, new business planning objectives, and scores more data. 

The trick to making all of this work for you lies in your ability to collect, analyze, and understand all your data from multiple sources. Then, as these sources interact, they create their own data streams, so the process continues to expand.

This data is priceless, and if you learn how to use this data proactively and gain a thorough understanding of what it all means - you’ll have started to understand the concept of business intelligence.

Let’s discover how you can use this to maximize your profits and grow your business.

Business intelligence or BI leverages all of your software and services and then transforms that data into workable insights that will speak to your businesses’ strategical and tactical decision-making.

This data collection is gathered on an ongoing basis and over specific periods to determine the impact that certain trading conditions, events, or campaigns have had on your business. If you know how to work with this data, you will gain priceless insights into your clients’ behavior, your staff’s performance, and where there are lapses in your businesses’ planning and delivery.

But as with all things business-driven, the data on its own isn’t going to do anything for you. You have to know what your primary objectives are for gathering that data in the first place and how the results of your data collection and analytical drive will serve those goals.

Once you’ve determined that, you can start thinking about the collection process and how you will evaluate the “data collection run.” That means the length of time you will collect data concerning specific events or conditions versus your ongoing data collection function.

LET’S LOOK AT MARKETING

When you consider your business’s marketing function, it’s probably divided between a few significant parts, and you need to understand these to formulate a viable marketing strategy.

Sales, communications, public relations, and communications, for example. Depending on the size and nature of your business, the level of sophistication that you employ here will differ from bigger or more complex companies. Still, you’ll invariably have these functions even if all of them - are performed by you.

If you’re launching a new campaign or hosting an event to drive awareness, the type of data that you can collect will determine how successful the campaign or event was. You’ll need to know how many customers or potential customers you interacted with, the level of interaction, and the outcome of that interaction. 

Data collected from these drives and events and analyzed adequately can offer you critical insights into how your overall business is operating and where it isn’t.  You can run marketing campaigns internally or outsource them to a full service marketing agency. 

It’s often helpful to do that because the level of insight that they can offer could prove integral to formulating an ongoing and evolving business plan.

When you are synergizing all of your business functions this way, the potential for real and workable data collection becomes exponential, and when you employ this as an ongoing process, you can really reap long-term benefits from understanding the collective idea of business intelligence.

Image By Geralt