Businesses need an arsenal of tools to stay afloat, especially with 600,000 businesses started every single year in the United States alone. With so much competition, business owners need to understand how to maximize their profits, improve their operations, and improve their customer experience year in and year out. All of these can help prevent businesses from failing, which is sadly the reality for 20% of businesses in the first two years.
One of the best ways businesses can improve their chances of survival in this competitive market is by using data-driven decision-making. Data-driven decision-making uses the power of data analytics to help businesses make decisions that will better their company and improve their longevity.
What Are Data Analytics?
Data analytics is the science of using raw data from your business to research trends, make decisions on operations, reach conclusions, and improve your business. Data analytics can be used to:
- Make predictive conclusions, meaning conclusions about what will happen in a business.
- Make descriptive conclusions, or examine what is currently happening in a business.
- Make diagnostic conclusions, as in determining why something happened with a business.
- Prescribe a plan of action, such as changing operations to improve efficiency or reduce costs.
Benefits of Using Data-Driven Decision Making
Data analytics is not an easy subject to grasp, but it is necessary to help a business survive. For instance, data analytics can help you, as a business owner, understand where to reduce costs. By examining data on spending costs and profit margins, it’s easy to know which operations and materials are proving to be more expensive than necessary.
Data analytics can also help businesses improve security. For instance, security analytics is a subset of data analytics that focuses on cybersecurity and reducing the risk of hackers and cyber-attacks.
Other benefits of data analytics and data-driven decision making for business include:
- Reducing unnecessary costs. Data-driven decision-making can help a business, for instance, understand how to optimize its inventory and prevent overspending.
- Streamlining operations. Data-driven decision-making and using data analytics can help a business determine what are the best options for manufacturers, shipping carriers, and other factors in the supply chain.
- Increase marketing. Data analytics can also help promote a business to customers by providing in-depth analytics on customer outreach, where customers prefer to shop, buyer personas, and much more.
How to Become Trained in Data Analytics
Many business owners might find that they become naturally adept at data analytics over the years. However, using data-driven decision-making might not be a skill set every business owner possesses. In addition, companies might want to hire people that are trained in data analytics to help improve their operations, decision making, and customer base.
This is where an education in data analytics can help. By earning a data analytics MBA online, students that want to start a career in business and business owners can gain valuable insight into how to properly implement data analytics into their business.
Benefits of an Online Data Analytics MBA
For working students and business owners, an online degree is one of the best ways to gain a valuable education while still earning money and operating their business. Online MBA programs with concentrations in data analytics have flexible scheduling, meaning business owners and students can take classes online during the morning, afternoon, or evening.
Earning a data analytics MBA online can also help students and business owners can a real-world perspective and remain up-to-date on the best business practices to date. This is crucial in a world where new ways of advertising, promoting, and operating a business continue to emerge every single day.
An online MBA program with a concentration in data analytics can help business owners understand the importance of data-driven decision-making and begin their journey toward growing their business to new heights.
