You may not have specifically noticed but people have started looking at numbers for quite some time now. The number of views, likes, or shares in social media, discounts offered on eCommerce websites, the number of positive reviews for any product, the time it will take for your booked cab to reach your location, or how much time did you spend on your smartphone for that matter. All this information that is available to your fingertips is the result of companies collecting a massive amount of user data and analyzing it to show you the interesting trends.
We generate around 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day, which is usually in the raw format. Such unstructured data collected by the companies is of no use until there is someone who can draw meaningful conclusions from it. The outcome requires companies to take that raw data, clean it, and then analyze it so that one can see actionable insights. These insights are very helpful in understanding customers better and making more data-driven decisions. For example, by analyzing customer data, a company can find out what discounts to offer, achieve better conversions, improve risk management, identify new business opportunities, and target the right audience.
If you are interested in starting a career in data science, then knowing about data analytics is crucial for you. While there are many options available, we would recommend you to take online Data Analytics free courses and get the basics right. Once you build the foundation, it will be easy for you to move on to the advanced topics. This article discusses the importance of data analytics in today’s competitive business environment and how you should gain the right skills and get hired.
Why is Data Analytics so Important?
The business world has changed a lot from the past few years. Today, it has become necessary for all businesses to have an online presence, otherwise they will be left behind by their competitors and lose their customers. The smartphone along with the internet is the cause of this change. It has changed the very way people approach any business. Earlier, people came to know about a new company through advertisements on television or newspapers. However, today people search for any new company on search engines and social media. This is the reason companies don’t want to miss out on any opportunity and compete aggressively.
Through search engines and social media, companies can gather a lot of user data. Such data is extracted, acknowledged and cleaned to identify and analyze behavioral information and techniques, and study the purchase patterns. If business data is analyzed properly, then it can help in finding insights that are valuable enough to bring a change in the patterns of how a business is already working and what can be improved to make better use of resources and gain more profits. This way companies can ensure that they are moving in the right direction.
Coupled with artificial intelligence and machine learning, data analytics can do wonders for a business. For example, you must have noticed that eCommerce sites like Flipkart and Amazon give you product recommendations based on your search history and past purchases. This recommendation engine is powered by machine learning, and this can be combined with data analytics to understand customer behavior and offer them the right discounts. As a result, customers would be more likely to buy those products. Thus data analytics, in this case, helped in making a more effective marketing strategy and better-focused pitching of products.
Operational cost is another area where data analytics proves to be quite useful. Now, there are different sectors of a business that have been assigned a fixed budget. Through analytics, one can determine the sectors that need more finances and which sectors are consuming unnecessary finances. Thus, you will have a clear understanding of where to cut costs and the technology to be applied to reduce operational and production costs. Even on the marketing side, companies can analyze which campaigns are proving to be more profitable and focus on future decisions accordingly.
So, we can now say that businesses give high importance to data analytics these days. But with such huge amounts of data at hand, how is data analytics feasible? Well, there are many powerful data analytics tools available in the market that eases your efforts to quite an extent. Tableau, RapidMiner, Qlik Sense, Microsoft PowerBI, Talend, and Splunk are among the best data analytics tools available in the market.
Over to You
The job market is full of opportunities for people willing to start their careers in data analytics. Data science is one of the fastest-growing career domains and you will get lucrative salaries across the world. By learning data analytics, you can help organizations in their efforts to cut losses, increase productivity, ensure optimal use of resources, and boost profits. The demand for data analytics isn’t fading away any time soon, and now is the right time to step into this promising career field. A number of online data analytics courses are available to help you learn everything from scratch.