We're firmly in the age of digital business, but let's go one step further. We're beyond the age of digital business and into the era of data. In this era, businesses don't just rely on digital architecture and gumption, they leverage data. Big data has already shaped our world in arenas from the commercial to the political, but many businesses are still waking up to its potential.

Here are 8 reasons why data analytics is essential for business success now and in the future.

The age-old measure of a business lies in how well it understands its customers. In earlier days, businesses had to rely on methods like surveys, customer feedback, and the success or failure of marketing campaigns to gauge the customer base.

Thanks to data analysis, all that has changed. Data analytics allows a modern business to achieve incredible new heights of customer knowledge. In fact, they can even understand more about customers than customers do about themselves—skipping over disruptive noise like unreliable self-reporting.

Going one better, this also means that analytics deliver even greater results as the business expands. An expanding customer base leads to a larger data pool from which to draw conclusions. The larger the data pool, the more robust the conclusions.

Predictability is the bedrock of a strong business. When a business can't predict the essentials, like cashflow and project hours, then making informed decisions becomes impossible. Worse, it can even jeopardize the future of the business.

For instance, a sudden financial shock (like the one the entire world just experienced in the form of COVID-19) can wipe out an unprepared business. And an unprepared business is often one with unpredictable cash flow.

Data analytics allows you to nail down the underpinning structures of your business, making them visible and predictable.

While this doesn't make a business invincible, it gives you a realistic view of your company's strengths and weaknesses and makes your business more resilient to shock.

We could go into a whole metaphor here likening a business to a ship on the open ocean, but you get the idea. Historically, businesses have always navigated uncharted waters through relatively primitive methods—the equivalent to spotting landmarks on the horizon.

Data analysis, in this extended metaphor, is celestial navigation. It offers a reliable, codified, and predictable method for charting your course. By designing your business objectives around supporting data, you can be more sure than ever of your business direction, allowing you to grow while taking fewer risks.

Businesses often confuses gathering data with the act of analysis. The truth is that both elements are required.

Without the analytical side of data-gathering, your data pool becomes nothing more than a lot of numbers. The analysis is what allows you to connect the dots, to figure out the story the data tells.

For instance, you may know that your busy months are June and July, but do you know why? Data analytics allow you to draw together your data in a way that provides meaning. Joined up with metrics like customer buying habits, for example, you may see patterns to the ebb and flow of your profits that were imperceptible before.

The thriving business should always be looking for the next stage of success. Even if you aren't actively growing, you should be getting better at what you're doing right now.

Business data analytics is the key to that evolution. Let's say your sales figures are strong, but analytics highlight that processing times are longer than expected. You can take that data and look into the processing arm of your business, tweaking and changing to bring processing times down and boost efficiency.

Just like that, data analytics has provided a path to bettering your business.

Of all the elements of a modern business, marketing can be one of the trickiest to nail down. Customer trends are fickle and unpredictable—even chaotic.

You might think that chaos makes analytics useless, but that couldn't be farther from the truth.

Instead, analytics brings order to chaos. By highlighting where a marketing campaign succeeded or failed through data analysis, you can make course-corrections for the next campaign. You can build on successes and steer clear of failures based on past performance and projections for future results.

The real challenge of modern business is to keep your sights fixed on your core business. With the business world growing increasingly complex and the speed of industry-level developments now literally measured in days, it's hard to keep all those plates spinning.

Data analysis provides a crucial pressure-release. By turning over many of the supporting operations of your company to data-driven solutions, you can free up business bandwidth to focus on your core business. That alone could put you ahead of your competition.

One of the most common threads uniting struggling business is a loss of control over the end-to-end business process. Often, operations become siloed, introducing inefficiencies and poor communication.

Siloed working occurs when a business' end-to-end operations become broken up into self-contained "silos", causing each silo to act almost like a miniature business in itself.

Data analysis can identify where these silos happen and allow an operation to reclaim control over the complete end-to-end process. This way, a business can directly tackle siloing as data trends identify its occurrence.

Large-scale data analytics are a recent addition to the business world, but they're here to stay. More than that, they're becoming one of the defining features of modern business. In the coming decades, businesses will live and die by their manipulation and understanding of data trends. So it's easy to see why you need to start paying attention to your data analytics today.

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