A Guide to Data-Backed Insights & Better Business Decisions

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September 7, 2023 Business

5 Steps Toward Achieving Better Insights With Properly Sourced Data

While shopping on large e-commerce websites, you might often encounter various price changes, new products, or even the removal of certain existing ones. Companies often make these changes based on multiple market conditions, but how do they know the right time for such a decision?

That’s where web data comes in. It helps companies and businesses gather market data, analyze the current conditions, and make better business decisions. Such decisions can improve brand recognition, increase profits, reduce costs, and more.

However, it’s not enough to let web scrapers gather massive amounts of data and decide based on those. Such data is often unstructured and won’t tremendously impact your business. Instead, companies must rely on the following five vital steps of data acquisition.

Define Data Goals

The internet is a vast sea of data, with over 80% being unstructured. Mindlessly gathering everything won’t benefit your company – such data is useless without analysis. However, analyzing massive amounts of data takes time. Once you’re ready to use it to your benefit, the current market trends have already changed, and your data is useless.

Instead, companies should define what they’re after and set clear goals about the data they’re looking for. That will ensure that proper data is gathered and reduce the amount of time needed for data analysis, which, in turn, will lead to better business insights and decisions.

Adequately Source Data

Sourcing data becomes much easier once you know what you’re after. However, you still have to consider numerous data sources and look into the quality of each source’s data.

Data sources, like G2, Crunchbase, GitHub, Trustpilot, etc. you can use them to your advantage, depending on the type of data you’re after. At this point, you can also think about including automated tools to gather such data.

Ensure Compliance With Regulations

Data is readily available in every corner of the internet, and numerous tools can help individuals and companies gather it. However, although the mentioned data is up for grabs, that doesn’t mean everyone should obtain and use it however they want.

Specific rules and regulations exist regarding who can use particular data, and, as a company, it’s one of your jobs to follow these rules. That will likely require employing a data protection officer and familiarizing yourself with various regulations that depend on your country’s laws.

When collecting data, it’s best to be transparent about it and obtain consent from whoever you’re collecting data from.

Employ Proper Analytics

As mentioned, most of the internet’s data is unstructured and, as such, quite challenging to read and use in business decisions. However, your business might require such data as it might be your goal to organize and use it to your advantage.

Nevertheless, understanding the difference between data types is vital in choosing the correct analytics tool. After all, regardless of the data type, all data must go through analysis before it becomes usable.

Segmenting your data is an excellent choice – it’ll help you gain deeper insights. Similarly, visualizing data and creating charts and graphs can help identify patterns.

Utilize Data in Business Decisions

Now that you have valuable data, you can start creating strategies that align with your obtained data. Whether you’re preparing to launch products, implement existing ones in different markets, or optimize your services, these data-driven strategies are bound to help, increasing your company’s chance of success.

It’s worth noting that markets change incredibly quickly, and new trends emerge constantly. That’s why you’ll likely require a developed system that allows for continuous monitoring of data sources and decisions you’ve made based on previous data. A feedback loop is quite valuable here.

Conclusion

Data holds immense value in today’s world. Companies are constantly looking for new ways to obtain, analyze, and use data to their advantage. However, most businesses struggle with these steps, so we’ve included a few tips on data collection techniques and better utilization of obtained data, as it’s vital in gaining enriched insights and making better business decisions.