Many industries these days rely on data: banking, consumer products, energy, government, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, and pharmaceuticals. No matter what your industry, you can use data analytics to make strategic and tactical decisions. Understanding how to manage industry, product, consumer behavior, and social media data give you an edge over the competition.
Earning a Degree
As an entrepreneur, you are always striving to be one step ahead of the competition. A Masters in Business Data Analytics can help give you the advantage you need. A strong understanding of analytics helps you cut out the guesswork. You gain fast access to insights so you can adjust your product research and develop marketing strategies accordingly resulting in increased profits.
There are four main benefits to earning a degree in business data analytics. You can provide upselling and cross-selling opportunities to your customers. You can use patterns you detect in data to discover what your customers are responding best to. Business intelligence allows you to improve efficiency saving you time and money. A good BI dashboard allows you to digest large amounts of data quickly, so you can make decisions without having to read through countless pages of reports. You can learn customer behaviors. Data analysis gives you a bird’s eye view of what people are buying and what they are not. Through information collection techniques and surveys, you can get an idea of how customers are engaging with your brand. You can use this information to better serve your customers.
Reading Books
A thirst for knowledge makes you a better entrepreneur. You can gain immense knowledge, perspective, and insight from books. Here is a list of books that will help you better understand the world of data we live in today and how to leverage in your business.
- Big Data at Work by Thomas H. Davenport: This book reveals the increasing importance of big data in organizations. Instead of working with data samples, we can now use powerful devices and the ability to store large amounts of data to work on large datasets. This book shows how big data influences our daily lives, companies, and jobs.
- Keeping Up with the Quants by Thomas H. Davenport and Jinho Kim: Data science is driven by numbers and math (quants). This book teaches the methods of using quantitative analysis for decision making. Don’t be scared if you are not great at math. This book is a wonderful introduction basic statistics and quantitative calculations.
- The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver: This book delves into the art and science of making predictions using data. The author is a famous statistician who correctly predicted the winner of 2012 U.S. Presidential elections for all 50 states. The author teaches the reader to filter out the noise when making predictions. With more and more data, predictions are becoming more prone to error due to noise.
- Web Analytics 2.0 by Avinash Kaushik: This is a great book for learning about web analytics. An Internet presence is becoming more and more vital. The author guides the reader through some actionable strategies for making a splash on social media. It helps you discover the right metrics and how to keep them all under control.
- Predictive Analytics by Eric Siegel: This is a great follow up to Web Analytics 2.0 which teaches the underlying concepts of Internet data, metrics, and key strategies. This book teaches you how to harness that knowledge and use it to make predictions.
Data analytics is an important part of business these days. Most businesses are constantly collecting data on customers but fail to capitalize on it. As an entrepreneur, learning how to leverage big data can give you a competitive advantage over the competition. Earning a degree is one of the best ways to gain knowledge in this field. But always continue learning by reading great books.
