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Business intelligence (BI) solutions help businesses maintain their competitive edge and stay at the forefront of their industry by giving them a clear view of their data. BI tools are utilized by 50% of all businesses, and projections indicate significant growth in the years to come. However, it might be challenging to fully grasp business intelligence and what it can do for you if you’ve never used a BI tool.
BI solutions aren’t exclusive to the top players and can be utilized by businesses of all sizes to harness powerful data analysis capabilities. Leveraging BI tools to optimize your business strategy may sound complicated and unnecessary if you own a small business.
Still, a good BI tool can completely change the game regarding achieving your business goals. Receiving insights and identifying trends is crucial for companies to scale and adapt with time. The best part about using business intelligence solutions is that their potential uses are practically unlimited!
What is Business Intelligence?
In simple terms, business intelligence (BI) is the process of transforming data into valuable insights that guide decisions, detect trends, and promote growth. Business intelligence integrates business analytics, data mining, data visualization, tools, and best practices to aid businesses in making well-informed, data-driven decisions.
It gives you a thorough understanding of your data and helps you utilize it to drive change, eliminate inefficiencies, and react immediately to supply or market changes. BI platforms generate insights on data collected from internal and external data systems, like various databases, flat files, social media platforms, and other data sources.
Why do Small Businesses need a BI Tool?
In a small business, analytics, data, and technology are crucial for sustainable growth. Today, every company’s decision needs to be well-researched to have a competitive advantage. Regardless of industry, every organization has access to a wealth of data they can leverage to their advantage, but unfortunately, not many do.
BI presents this otherwise idle data intelligibly and concisely, assisting businesses in making the most of their data. By combining the power of technology and business expertise, BI can help you make fully informed decisions for your small business and stay ahead of the competition. Here are a few reasons to make the switch to BI:
- It gives you the ability to gain customer insights
- It improves your business operations visibility
- Real-time data availability
- Improved efficiency across the organization
- It analyzes financial data to track revenue, profits, and other KPIs
- It can help eliminate revenue & cost leakage
- It boosts your organization’s sales by predicting the sales cycle
- It helps you develop better marketing campaigns with a higher return on investment (ROI)
- It enables you to align key performance indicators with business strategies
BI tools and platforms streamline the whole analysis process, making it easier for people to comprehend their complex data without the technical know-how themselves. Numerous BI platforms are available for ad hoc reporting, custom dashboards, and data visualization.
How Small Businesses can use BI Tools?
More organizations are moving towards a self-service approach to data. Self-Service Business Intelligence (SSBI) analytics empower every business user to gain data insights without the need to call in the IT department or technical experts. Of course, your small business can utilize BI tools in many ways, so your specific use case will mostly depend on your organization’s industry.
- To track sales and marketing performance.
- To track revenue, profits, and other KPIs
- To analyze customer preferences and behavior
- To Identify issues and bottlenecks in operations
- To Identify trends and patterns within the business and in the market.
BI Software for Small Businesses
Focus your search on tools designed with small businesses in mind. These are more likely to better fit your organization’s specific budget and needs without pushing you to pay for more features than you need. In addition, many of these can scale as you grow, so you can get those extra features as your business grows. Some important BI tool features include dashboarding, data visualization, reporting, predictive analytics, data mining, etc.
While choosing the right BI platform, it is essential to remember what key features will be most helpful to your business. Look for an intuitive tool with various dashboard and visualization options that offers intelligent insights, alerts for good and bad metrics, deployment flexibility, and integration options with multiple platforms and applications.
A tool that meets all the above criteria is INSIA. A robust business intelligence tool like INSIA can help your small business grow to its full potential. INSIA is a self-service platform designed for non-technical business users that integrates and collects your data from multiple sources (like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Excel, MySQL, and many more) and enables you to create visually appealing reports through a Google-like Search. Connect to INSIA in a couple of clicks and monitor your business performance & ROI of your marketing decisions with pre-built plug-n-play KPIs and automated dashboards. Click Here to check it out!
Conclusion
Business intelligence (BI) solutions help businesses maintain their competitive edge and stay at the forefront of their industry by giving them a clear view of their data. Regardless of industry, every organization has access to a wealth of data they can leverage to their advantage, but not many do. BI presents this irrelevant data intelligibly and concisely, assisting businesses in making the most of their data. A robust business intelligence tool like INSIA can help your small business grow to its full potential.