Marketing

A business owner should make and make critical decisions every day, and it will be easy to make the right decision when you have the right information. Here, business intelligence tools come into use. The intelligence tools help you identify the outcomes and know the risks for making the right decision.

What is business analytics?

Business analytics helps you collect data from multiple sources and then utilize the data to improve your Business. You will get to know what’s working and what’s not with the help of analytics software so that you can develop strategies for your business growth.

Let’s discuss with an example if you track your daily sales through business analytics tools on Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays in mid-mornings and evenings. You can get to know how your staff your shop, how you can set your hours, and stock inventory.

Here are some tasks that these tools help to your Business, they are.

  • Forecasting and budgeting
  • Performance tracking
  • Increasing productivity
  • Identifying trends
  • Identifying issues
  • Improving your customer experience
  • Improving supply chain efficiencies.

So, if you have more data, then the business tools allow you to describe and understand it, and it will be easy to make essential decisions for your Business. 

Data analytics includes analytics and statistics and shifting the data, and it is just part of business intelligence. So, business owners can develop an actionable plan to improve their Business as business intelligence software makes connections from data.

 Types of Analytics tools for small Business:

If you start using business analytics tools, then it will turn your business success. It helps with everything on what and when to sell, engaging customers, and everything. 

Below are some tools of intelligence and analytics capabilities to use in your Business.

  1. Web Analytics:

Web analytics tools help you identify how many people visit your site, how they are visiting, and what they are doing after visiting your site. It is crucial to understand how your customers interact with your site to increase sales and drive success if you own an online site. 

You can use Google Analytics, one of the most commonly used analytics tool, which is free.

2. Social Media Analytics:

You should identify how people are engaging with your content if you are marketing on social media. Each tool has its analytics features that help with much information and also provide detailed reporting tools. Hootsuite or Buffer, these social media analytics provides an aggregated view across your accounts.

3. Point of Sale Analytics

Point of sale analytics transforms all your transactions into reports to be easy to read and act accordingly. You can have a view of sales trends over distinct periods with the product category, location, and also with the employee.

4. Customer analytics:

A customer relationship management (CRM) allows you to store your customers’ information to communicate with them easily. After that, you should collect all the insights about your customers from the communications you had with them and from marketing activities.

 Make sure what kind of emails they like to receive. Paint a picture of your buyer’s habits if you have CRM, which integrates with your POS or else if your POS has any built in customer directories like Square. You can identify new versus return customers and average spend per customer.

Selection of Business Analytics tools:

You think to use the same criteria when evaluating all the possibilities if you decide which tools are right for you. It’s not like the same criteria you have to use for social media tools for web analytics. Make sure that you use the same questions for all the vendors you are evaluating in a single category. 

Here are Some questions you have to ask when selecting business analytics tools.

  • Goal by getting this intelligence tool? What are the insights I want from it?
  • What are the cost and expected returns for the investment? 
  • Is it easy to use the analytics tools? How long I learn it and train the employees?
  • Where all my data is stored? How to access that data?
  • Does it integrate with other business tools?
  • Do it scale with me as I grow and how will?

Once you analyze all these, then the analytics tools you have will fit with your needs.