Entrepreneurship and business programs are increasingly offering courses and entire degrees in analytics. This is a quite a turnaround because entrepreneurs are historically seen as creative innovators, not an analytical bunch. Yet the ability to pull and analyze data, and make decisions based on that information, is becoming an essential skill set whether you work for a large organization or run your own shop. Let’s discuss why learning business analytics will make you a better entrepreneur.
It Helps You Keep Up with New Technology
If you want to analyze the behavior of customers on your website so you can optimize it to increase conversions, you need to know how to do business analysis.
Don’t waste time and lose out on opportunities because you relied on intuition. Instead, rely on A/B testing and logistic regression. Analyze your e-commerce site so you can determine which products have the highest return on investment, which ones are your bread and butter, and which products need to have the search engine optimization or marketing campaign tweaked. The growth of online business and the massive amount of data it creates is one reason why many younger entrepreneurs choose to study business analytics – they know they must know it to succeed.
Suffolk University has a great online business analytics program that you can follow in your down time. It gives students an overview of data science, how data analysis helps them improve business functions, and apply data analysis to various roles in the organization. It also teaches students how to use a variety of business intelligence tools and glean actionable advice from them. You can learn more about Suffolk University and their program at https://online.suffolk.edu/programs/ms-business-analytics.
It Gives You a Cost-Effective Way to Grow Your Business
With a thorough understanding of business analytics, you’ll be able to identify underserved market segments or populations that are buying your product for some purpose you didn’t know it served.
Once identified, you can create content and marketing material just for them. You’ll dramatically increase sales in a market that is already buying your product. This has a very high return on the investment, and it is much more certain than trying to create a whole new product.
For example, business intelligence allows you to know for certain what upselling and cross-selling opportunities are likely to be successful with each customer. You won’t hurt your reputation by recommending products of no interest to the customer while trying to figure out what they may want. Take it to a higher level and you can offer personalized service and marketing to each customer based on detailed data analysis of thousands of other customers like them.
It Saves You Time
Entrepreneurs who can leverage business intelligence know how to use sophisticated software and, often, programming languages to mine and analyze business data. The goal is to find actionable, data-driven recommendations.
This information could help you find new customer markets. It may help you identify the source of growing negative opinions of your product. You’ll be able to identify equipment in need of repair and fix it before a catastrophic failure. Or you may identify ways you could alter your production line or service delivery model to deliver a higher quality product faster and cheaper.
Another way business intelligence tools save you time is via their dashboards. These dashboards distil massive streams of data to a few basic metrics that matter to you. Know where key metrics like manufacturing efficiency, defect rates, and profits are at any given time. You don’t have to run reports and read them to get the information.
It Saves You Money
One benefit of business analytic tools is that it allows almost everyone to pull data and check metrics. They don’t have to have a background in IT or business to run reports and understand what they mean.
This allows maintenance technicians and operations managers alike to see which production line is out of spec and needs to be checked out. Everyone from the maintenance manager to the inventory manager can see how many failures they’ve had this month and how fast they’re going through their inventory of a particular part. They can order parts well before they run out, and the root cause could be addressed before it causes a costly unplanned shutdown.
When you have access to business analytic tools, you can perform your own research on keywords related to your product, your reputation on social media, and other things that used to require hiring an outside consultant to learn.
Conclusion
Entrepreneurs are turning to data analysis because it is increasingly essential to succeeding in business, no matter what business you’re in. Understanding and being able to use this data to your advantage will give you a significant edge over the competition and ultimately increase your bottom line.
