There's A Pot Of Gold Hiding In Your Data

Buzzwords like Big Data and analytics fly around fast and furious these days, and rightly so, as information is key to making smart choices and putting together intelligent strategies that stand a better chance of working. This is all great, but what many businesses today need, particularly the smaller businesses, is some way to actually find more opportunities somewhere in that morass of data. Seriously now, what are you supposed to be looking for?

The article "Gaining Business Intelligence from Hidden Data with Splunk" notes that useful information can be derived from "abnormal" data streams such as security or environmental systems. The article argues that these data streams can provide a better picture and understanding of a company's operating costs, thereby helping to save money.

Big Data's information can show businesses what their customers want, and that means more sales

Let's take a look at how analyzing data can help increase business opportunities. Welcome to the world of Business Intelligence, or BI to the people in the know.

Key Performance Indicators
Otherwise known as KPI (yes, more acronyms), these are the things that any good marketer is constantly checking out, spotting trends and where the company is over or under performing. KPIs include:
The Fundamentals: First off, there are some basic bits of information that you need to be aware of. The basics include how many visitors your website gets, how long they stay, and how many abruptly left. That latter one, also known as the bounce rate, can be particularly telling. If you have an inordinately high bounce rate, you have to start wondering what's on your site that's making people click in, go "Uh uh..no way", and leave post haste.
Keyword Tracking: If you track your website's rankings for individual keywords, then you can get a good idea as to which search engine optimization campaigns you're running are actually working. In this case, you're looking for first page results.
Visitor-To-Buyer Ratio: How many people are coming to your site versus how many people are actually buying something? This is yet another good indicator of how effective your marketing efforts are.
Incremental Sales: This indicator shows just how many of your campaigns lead to actual sales. Using this, you can get a good handle on what things you need to emphasize in future marketing promotions, and what things need to be avoided.
Social Media: By monitoring your social media interactions, particularly when it comes to Likes, Shares, Follows, and Retweets, you can get a good grasp on how well your efforts in this area are working out.

Translating It Into An Opportunity
So it's been established that in order to make your data work for you, you need to analyze it and spot the trends. Okay, fine. Then what?

Then it's a matter of paying attention to what the public is telling you through all of this data. For instance, say you are a freelance artist who does commissions, but you have a ton of comments, culled from data gathering analytics, from visitors to your site expressing a wish that they could draw as well. Sounds like a great opportunity to hold some beginners' art classes.

Or, turning it to something in-house, perhaps your own company's environmental data shows certain patterns in unnecessary energy usage that correspond with particular times of the year or even time of day. Your data may be alerting you to some wasteful energy practices in your company, something which, if addressed intelligently, could mean cutting wasteful spending.

So it appears that this collected data can not only show you where people's tastes are and help you model your marketing strategies accordingly, it can also help spot inefficient, wasteful practices within your company. It's all a matter of reading the data and letting it educate you. For more insights into Business Intelligence, check out "Data Mining - Process Of The Invention, Trends and Tactics."