The irony facing many businesses today is that even if they are failing to leverage the huge potential of the mountains of data they compile and collate, they are obliged to hold and process it anyway. It, therefore, makes absolute sense to leverage the most from the opportunities it provides, especially in view of statistics which suggest almost 4 million Google searches are now taking place every single minute!
Why BI is too important for your business to ignore it
BI (business intelligence) is now a part of virtually every data processing operation and that includes those of your business. Whether you simply choose to use it by default or make the most of the opportunities it offers, is a matter of choice. You ought to know, however, that if you continue to ignore the potential of this rapidly evolving technology you will also be leaving an ever-increasing heap of money on the table. So, if we have aroused your curiosity in the slightest, maybe now is a good time to take a look at the following five ways in which business intelligence tools will help your business to become more competitive in the year ahead.
Implementing location-centric strategies
There is a myriad of different reasons why you would want to know why one thing sells in one location and not another. The hard truth is that without usable data, you could spend an inordinate amount of time and costly resources attempting to discover what those reasons might be. The good news is that BI provides the resources which will analyze your data to discern what sells best at what time in what location. Also, by comparing your data against that of your competitors and different sales locations within your own database, you will then be able to optimize using up-to-date and relevant data.
Refining and optimizing your marketing
Unless you really do use a crystal ball (one that works anyway) you will be operating on pure guesswork. That is unless you are harnessing the potential of marketing optimization through business intelligence-driven data. Using BI, you will replace guesswork with cold hard facts which are delivered directly from your own data in simple and easy to understand formats. Effective business intelligence is able to gather relevant data from a myriad number of different metrics including but by no means limited to such things as differing sales sources such as digital assets including social media, websites, affiliate links, and others. Once in possession of such data, you are then able to focus your marketing efforts where they are most likely to provide the optimum results.
Using BI to create relevant business models
Add blindness and marketing overload are just a couple of the negative challenges which your business has to meet on a daily basis. This provides you with all the motivation you need to ensure that your marketing is modeled on tried and tested strategies that are seen to work in the real world. While it may be true that a smaller sized operation could once have coped with handling its data manually, this is no longer the case and such a method would now prove to be highly cost-ineffective. An entry-level BI driven data analysis system, on the other hand, has the potential to create hundreds of spare hours that would otherwise be spent manually combing over your existing data.
Analyzing the behavior of your consumers
Whether you have awoken to the fact or not already, the monetary success of most digital marketing platforms already thrives on the collection and use of its client’s data. The bulk of this data is gleaned from identified behaviors and user patterns and it has a direct effect on how such platforms interact further with those users. The really good news is that your business can also benefit from accessing data about how your visitors (potential buyers) and customers behave. From selecting tailored approaches to different client groups and forming relationships to extending consumer lifecycles to creating brand new clients, business intelligence-driven data will facilitate all of them.
Utilizing the leverage potential of BI through inventory analysis
While retail businesses have already been leveraging the power of business intelligence-driven through such things as EPOS (electronic point of sale) systems for decades, it is now easy to apply to virtually any digital business too. Unlike conventional inventory accounting software such as SAS (software as a service), your own BI driven data systems can be configured to interrogate and analyze your inventory and its movements in real-time.
Armed with such valuable information, business owners and managers are then better able to make more informed financial decisions. Such things as overstocks, over-shelf life products, and instances of exhausted supply are then far more likely to become things of the past. Why there has never been a better time to embrace this new technology. Whatever type or size of business you operate it is certain to benefit from the introduction of business intelligence-driven data analytics.
The fact is that whether you choose to embrace this rapidly evolving technology or not, you can be certain that many of your competitors will already have done so. Furthermore, thanks to the speed at which business intelligence continues to move forward, the longer you put it off, the more catching up you are likely to have to do. Conversely, by making the astute move into BI now, you will be placing your business or organization at a distinct advantage to others which have not.
There is no good reason why any forward-thinking business would not want to improve their profits and position in the marketplace and making the use of business intelligence tools is the quickest and most effective way to do exactly that.
