The volume of data available to businesses is expected to reach 44 zettabytes by the year 2020. That’s a mind-boggling huge body of information, one that businesses can use to assess the effectiveness of marketing initiatives, to use as barometers for better performance, and to identify new optimization opportunities in all areas of operation.
To make use of all that data, though, you need the right tools in place. And with the average salary for an experienced data analytics professional starting at $65,000 annually, smaller businesses may be at a disadvantage.
Even paying a third-party service or an individual consultant on an hourly basis can get expensive over time, especially if you regularly need information on how customers are responding to your brand.
Fortunately, SMBs have numerous alternatives to data analyst fees. If your business needs data but can’t commit a large chunk of your budget to get it, here are a few options.
Analytics are already built into many of the resources businesses use to promote their products and services. Facebook Insights, for instance, can deliver information on a business page’s interactions, while Google Analytics will provide basic information on the performance of your website.
Using Google Analytics alone, you can learn the demographics of your site visitors, the location of those visitors, and how they found your site.
In addition to Facebook and your website, you can track your activity on Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. Businesses can also use tools that monitor multiple social platforms to pull data into one dashboard.
As powerful as built-in analytics can be, competitive businesses realize that they’ll need more intensive information if they want to excel in their own industries. In larger corporations, analysts would be brought in to monitor incoming data and regularly pull reports. These professionals would also be able to cull information from a variety of external sources, such as population information for your marketing campaigns or predictive analytics to help you determine the resources you’ll need for an upcoming sale.
A number of vendors are rising to meet the demand for a new generation of powerful and flexible analytics solutions. For example, Sisense's embedded analytics solution enables companies to collate complex data from multiple sources in various formats and present them in embeddable dashboard widgets. These widgets can be placed in apps, team sites or wherever else business leaders deem useful.
