What Is Business Analytics?

Business analytics is a process that helps teams leverage data to drive their business decisions. Typically, business analytics solutions are used to generate insights, projections, and reporting. These solutions collect, manage, compile, and parse the data to make it easier for teams to access and read.

When it comes to business analytics, you’ll typically be dealing with descriptive, diagnostic, prescriptive, and predictive analysis. Here’s a quick breakdown of each:

Descriptive - Descriptive analysis looks at historical data and helps you find trends and patterns in the data.

Diagnostic - Diagnostic analysis utilizes historical data to find out why certain events happen

Prescriptive - Prescriptive analysis allows you to use testing data to determine the best way forward and determine results based on different inputs.

Predictive - Predictive analysis helps you create forecasts to guide your business strategy.

Using these different types of analysis can help you guide your business decisions and strategies. With the right business analytics tools, this process can become much simpler. Let’s take a deeper dive into the definition of business analytics and why it’s important for a business to implement.

Business Intelligence vs Business Analytics

Before getting deeper into the benefits of business analytics, it’s important to make a distinction between business analytics and business intelligence.

Business intelligence (BI) is used to collect historical and current data and derive key business metrics that reflect the state of a company. BI data is often used in reporting, dashboarding, and performance assessment.

Business analytics, by comparison, applies data science to historical and current data to make predictions and gain insights into important decisions about corporate strategy. Business analytics allows companies to make data-driven decisions and increase the likelihood of success in future efforts.

How Do BI and Data Analytics Inform Business Decisions? Key Examples

Data analytics, when applied in the business setting, can provide value for every department in your company. From sales teams to customer service centers, accurate data and insightful business analytics can lead to synchronicity and success.

Here are a few key examples of how your data analytics can help you make more accurate and clear-headed data-driven decisions in your organization.

Data-Driven Software Product Development

Your software development team will be supercharged with business analytics by their side. With business analytics, your business will have true data democratization. This means that everyone on your team can access the data they need, when they need it.

With these capabilities, your software development team will be able to improve processes such as product strategy, customer support, software testing, delivery to market, and much more. Without data organization and democratization with business analytics, your team will have to sort through unorganized and poorly structured databases to find what they need. Business analytics tools will allow them to access self-service analytics and reports that allows them to make the best decisions in the development process and deliver a better product to users.

Assess the Performance of Marketing Strategies

Business analytics allows you to create better, more engaging marketing strategies that are personalized for your customers. Without data, it’s nearly impossible to make an effective marketing campaign. Business analytics data not only gives you the data your marketing team requires, it gives them insights into how their campaigns could perform in the future and how they can improve their campaigns in real time.

Business analytics looks at every stage of the customer journey and helps your team track them through the funnel. Find out what works in the sales cycle and what doesn’t. Create an in-depth customer profile that helps your team create a more curated campaign. Find out what platforms and channels your customers are most likely to engage with and respond to. When you have data-driven marketing campaigns, you’ll cut down on marketing costs while increasing return on investment. You’ll hit your KPI goals like never before and have more insight on your strategies than ever.

Improve Onboarding and Training for New Sales Reps

Your HR team relies on data just as much as any other department. With business analytics, you can empower them to create better onboarding processes and more engaging sales training for new reps. With data at their fingertips, your HR department will see how training is affecting new reps going into the field. It can help them see what reps are responding to and what works best. It also helps them find the best, most intuitive ways to onboard.

In addition to training and onboarding, business analytics can help your HR department mine their recruitment channels more efficiently and find the best talent. Data-driven decision making in HR departments is becoming increasingly common and one of the best ways to find, retain, and improve top talent. This makes your business a better place to work as well, since new reps will feel like they’re getting better attention and the resources they need to do their best work.

Enable a Data-Driven Culture for Your Business with Narrator

Encouraging and enabling a data-driven culture is no longer an option for businesses, it’s quickly becoming a necessity. If you want to empower your team to make data-driven decisions and give them access to a single source of truth, then you need the right business analytics solution.

Narrator provides all of this and more. With Narrator, your team gets self-service analytics that allows anyone on your team to get the data they need within minutes. Your data team doesn’t need to get involved for your marketing, HR, sales, or other departments to get in-depth reports. With Narrator's Analyze Button, everyone can easily get the insights they need to make the best decision for your business.