Understand thy business, understand thyself: A guide to business analytics

It's safe to say that the COVID-19 pandemic did bring Australian industry to a grinding halt for some period of time.

In March of 2020, many businesses across the country were suddenly scrambling to find ways that they could continue operating in the face of strict lockdown restrictions.

Even organisations that didn't have to 'close their doors' entirely, were still facing drastically limited growth opportunities and dwindling profit margins.

Whilst many have been able to rebuild in this post-lockdown reality, there were a fair amount of casualties, and the wider Australian economy has had to bear the brunt of those losses.

The loss of these homegrown is, however, incredibly temporary, and signs of rebuilding have already begun to make themselves known.

For instance, the Australian education system has reflected an influx of tertiary level students engaging with digital technologies and modern business courses.

More and more students are looking at undertaking a master of business analytics over regular MBA courses, to ensure that they are well-equipped to tackle future economic challenges as they may come.

But what exactly is business analytics, and why is it so crucial to ensuring the strength of Australia's economy post-lockdown?

We'll be taking a closer look at this emerging discipline below, as well as answer any and all questions surrounding its growing popularity amongst tertiary level students.

If you are a small business owner or managerial member of staff, you may already be aware of the insights that market analytics can provide to your wider organisation.

Market research and data analytics both provide your business with the information it needs to create a well-structured and well-informed growth strategy.

The ability to ascertain what movements will bring success generally differentiates underperforming enterprises from their thriving competitors.

Business analytics can also play a significant role in the development of digital marketing strategies as well.

Just as this discipline can provide organisations with the right tools and resources that they'll need in order to go through all five stages of their business growth strategy and prepare themselves for future expansion, a thorough analysis conducted by business analysts may also allow organisations to expand on their goods and services as well as promote those expansions all at the most optimal times.

Understanding how to reach your buyers can mean the difference between a high-converting digital marketing campaign, and a campaign that just drains away at your organisation's marketing budget.

In fact, business analytical practices will also allow your organisation to keep track of your campaign's conversion rates so that you can gather archival data regarding the effectiveness of your past, present, and potentially even future digital marketing initiatives.

Given the great economic uncertainty we've experienced over the last two years, the sheer advantages that business analytical practices can offer is becoming increasingly transparent to Australian businesses of all shapes and sizes.

An investment in business analytics is effectively an investment in your company's longevity, in consolidating your business as a fixture of its industry, and in ensuring future incomes for your expanding workforce for the foreseeable future.

So how exactly can you ensure that your organisation is taking full advantage of the analytical resources that may be available to them? There are generally three methods that Australian businesses can follow to make sure that they're making full use of data that may be relevant to them.

First and foremost, you can utilise digital resources like business software to help automate your organisation's data collection and analysis.

Alongside this, you may also choose to outsource your organisational research to business analytics agencies to get an expert eye to analyse data you've harvested yourself, or conduct wider research into your market or industry.

Outsourcing is the method most utilised by small to medium level enterprises who may be reducing their daily expenses and reallocating funding to accommodate their expanding workforce.

The third and usually most fruitful option, is to hire your own team of in-house analytical experts. Whilst this is oftentimes the most expensive option, the ability to maintain full ownership and control over your organisation's archival data is truthfully a game changer.

Organisations who invest in analytics professionals are able to create highly meticulous growth strategies of their own accord and by using a variety of data sets that are always available to them.

Of course, hiring professional business analysts is not a top priority for every business, and so only larger corporations tend to have their own in-house team of analysts.

There's no denying, however, that having your own dedicated analytics team is a great advantage, and a company with a large enough budget to invest in analytics is likely to do so alongside their continuing investments in their own digitalisation, one of the other most topical business investments in our post-lockdown economy.

Now that we've gotten a good sense of the value behind business analytics as a discipline, it may be worth asking yourselves this question.

We have had our fair share of economic uncertainty, not just here in Australia, but also on a global scale.

The solutions that we'll be seeking to minimise future risks of a pandemic disrupting global industry to this degree ever again are likely going to be highly reliant on both data analytics as well as digital resources.

But will this be enough to erase economic uncertainty as a phenomenon entirely?

The short answer to this is quite honestly 'no'. Data analytics can help us weather coming storms, but they can't entirely predict how disruptive those storms may be in their nature to businesses operating at a local level, particularly because these smaller businesses don't have the luxury of archival organisational data.

What we do know is that organisations who were able to take advantage of market analytics during the pandemic, were amongst the first to invest in the digitalisation that allowed them to provide their customers with alternative digital processes to replace in-person or face-to-face customer service interactions.

In a similar fashion, business analytics have been known to inspire whole businesses to be developed in themselves alongside helping businesses stay afloat.

Take Uber for example. Over ten years ago now, what started as a small taxicab company operating out of San Francisco recognised the value of being able to use your smartphone to hail a cab.

Uber's ability to act promptly on their findings allowed them to become the face of ridesharing apps, a service that has now become a fixture of economies across the globe.

Business analytics won't eradicate economic uncertainty, but the discipline will definitely allow us to emerge from these periods of uncertainty with greater and greater strengths, especially during this digital age.