Introduction

Gathering information is an important thing to do. But, it is also important what you will do with the information you get. Does it allow you to get actionable insights?

Actionable insights are meaningful and useful findings that result from any Data. So, it is not enough to have plenty of Data to catch meaningful insights. In other words, you should learn how to interpret data and turn it into valuable insights.

So, I will try to explain how you can interpret data and get actionable insights for your business in this blog post.

‍Information can be thought of on three different levels:

• Data: the component pieces
• Analytics: sorting data into meaningful groups 
• Insights: contextualizing analytics with real-world information 

The first step which takes you to actionable insights is selecting your Data sources. This can vary from social media to NPS. 

After deciding on the data source, you should choose how to analyze it. At this point, analytic tools will help you because reading them manually is not an efficient way of analysis. One person can process 400 unstructured data elements in eight hours. Going through one million comments would take 2,500 days to process,  or just under seven years. 

Now, it is time to turn the analysis into actionable insights. 

‍Benefits of Actionable Insights

→Make better decisions. Actionable insights allow you to make better decisions for your business because here is where you see customers’ negative and positive ideas about your product or service. So, by listening to them, you can see your strengths and weaknesses. 

→Help for Marketing strategy. Improving your weaknesses and putting forward your strengths can be a good way for your marketing strategy. 

→Improve the experience of your customers. In the end, you improve the experience of your customers, which will come back to you as business growth.

→ Allows quicker response times. Insights that trigger un-programmed decisions, primarily driven by predictive and prescriptive analytics can help get an edge over your competitors.

→ Improve operational efficiency by identifying actionable insights within your data resulting in process improvements.

→Helps to make better use of resources by identifying where you should invest and work on next to drive future growth.

‍Three steps for actionable insights

1. Define your goals and objectives
2. Use context to simplify data
3. Use visuals to show your findings

‍1. Define your goals and objectives

It's more likely to drive action when insight is closely tied to your key business goals and strategic initiatives. So, you should define what your goal is while creating insights. 

Insights based on key performance indicators (KPIs) and other key metrics can be a way of defining your objective because it’s easier to interpret and convert strategically-aligned insights into tactical responses.

This way often relates directly to the levers in your business that you control, influence, or are focused on.

‍2. Use context to simplify data

It is hard to move forward with insight if you lack a transparent background to appreciate why it’s essential or unique. We often need a comparison or benchmark to give data proper context. Especially, if you do a competitive analysis, a benchmark will help you to catch regarding insights.

It is also crucial to know how to interpret that data and contextualize it within your user’s reality. When we put ourselves in the user's shoes and empathize, that’s when we will understand and predict the real impact of our ideas.

‍3. Use visuals to show your findings

65% of people are visual learners. So, using graphs, charts, diagrams, etc. will help you follow your analysis, making it easier to extract insights from data. 

Data visualization helps to tell stories by curating data into a form easier to understand, highlighting the trends and outliers. A good visualization tells a story, removing the noise from data and highlighting the useful information.

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By integrating visual data, you can reduce the amount of time it takes to create a report, allowing you to focus on more critical tasks to scale your business.

‍Bonus Tip

‍Invest in the right analytics and attribution tools. 

I have explained how you can get actionable insights from data. So, during this exploration, you can use an analytics tool to make the process easier and quicker. Here is where Pivony’s artificial intelligence comes into play. 

Pivony as a social intelligence tool will help you to formulate your insights for your business. To discover more, you can book a demo now.