Why do we need data analytics in a company?
Your company has web developers and UX/UI designers. But do you need data analysts? In case you are wondering I’ll explain why you should get (quickly) data analysts.
When you are starting a company from a scratch, most probably you don’t have any data yet. You have no customer data, you have no sales data, no employee data, etc. So you need web developers and database engineers to create the digital base of your company.
So your company grows and now you have tons of sales data. The number of your employees has grown from yourself to 50. Now you need to analyze retrospectively how well / bad you have done. Now you need a data analyst.
Retrospective analysis
When you have lots of sales records, clients churn records, website conversion rate, website bounce rate you can analyze these data. You can try to find patterns/clusters of your users/customers. You can try to find a reason why your client left or why your sales on certain products decrease in summer without any reason. Are you targeting the right clients for this marketing campaign? These are the questions that data analysts can help you solve.
Predictive modeling
So, you have your retrospective analysis. Now you want to know which client you should target this summer based on the 10 years sales records that you have. You need to make a prediction model. You can make a prediction model to predict certain outcomes. This will come of course with a certain confidence interval.
So as a company when should you invest in data analytics? Well, you should start from yesterday. The acceleration of business cycles, product lifetimes, and international competition means you need a better insight into your clients, your market, and the current and future trends.
“Knowledge is power.”
Sir Francis Bacon
As a company, you can hire an external strategy consultant for your analytics but you can also grow this capability internally by training your internal resources towards the use of data analytics or hire data analytics to be a part of the operations team or when the company is big enough a dedicated strategy and analytics division can be created to help other parts of the business internally.
So, yes data analytics will be an essential part of every company that has growth ambitions. I hope that my article can help you demonstrate the importance of analytics to give you an edge in the market.
