How Do Insights-Driven Approaches Lead To Business Success?

To maximise the chances of your business succeeding, you need a data-driven approach. This is even more important when the decision to be made is of high importance for your business’s survival and success. 

An insight-driven approach gives businesses the tools to understand and quantify the consequences of different decisions. Based on the data, you can anticipate the outcome of an action and steer your company toward success based on pure facts, not just intuition.

Insights-driven is a buzzword in the business world today. In this article, you’ll learn what this means and how it can lead to the success of your business.

What makes a business insights-driven?

When you base your business decisions on data and insights obtained through various forms of research, you’re creating an insights-driven business. These days, every company is a data company to a certain extent, but not all companies can be categorised as insights-driven.

Companies that base their decisions on data are more objective about the steps they take. They have formulated a system for collecting, as well as analysing, and using data to form new strategies. 

It all starts with data. Research shows that companies that use analytics enjoy better efficiency and higher productivity, more effective decision-making, and better performance overall. However, data is only a starting point. What you do once you collect it is even more important.

A useful guide on how to turn data into insights

Following an insights-driven approach is a very detailed, carefully thought-out process. Instead of basing decisions on instincts, theories learned, or traditions, businesses use actual data in the form of numbers, answers, or stats to make choices. The interpretation of those numbers is the basis of an insights-driven approach. Simply glancing at website analytics isn’t enough.

So, when does research data turn into an actual insight?

To get the answer to this question, you should take a look at Maze’s guide about card sorting and other research methods. Making data-led decisions means properly evaluating important metrics before you take steps to optimise your business. 

Tools like Maze not only facilitate the research method creation process i.e. help you create forms and questionnaires, but they also help you analyse the information you’ll obtain. This is a very important step and the reason why such companies are so highly valued by businesses. 

Thanks to Maze, you can collect the data you need to make your decisions, but also get it analysed. Maze will provide you with useful reports that will save you valuable time, and you can look at the finalised data to make your decisions. 

Now that you know what an insights-driven approach means, let’s move on to why you need it for your business’s success. 

Reasons why you need an insights-driven approach

If you’re still wondering whether or not you should invest in data gathering and analysis, the answer is right here. Let us present you with the main reasons why you need to develop an insights-driven approach. 

Insights lead to smarter decisions

When you collect data and analyse it, and make your decisions based on those insights, you are evaluating your options before you take action. This way, you can anticipate what will happen if you take a certain step, what troubles you can face along your way, and how to do it properly.

For example, customer data will show you if your target audience is interested in what you’re planning to put on the market. When you implement surveys and check customers’ behaviours, you can use this information to decide if a new product idea is promising or not. 

A lot of the time, what we think will sell like crazy ends up being a big, unnecessary expense for the company. You need to know what your customer needs and wants before you invest in new product development. 

This goes to every process of your business, too. You’ll need data to determine where to market your products and what marketing tools to invest in. Insights can show you where to invest in social ads, how to price your product, and what type of content to use to promote it. 

In other words, insights will lead you to make smarter, better decisions. 

Insights give you more confidence

Business people have many things on their plate. It’s no wonder that you have your doubts about which step to take next. You wonder what to sell, where to sell it, what price to put, how to offer support to your audience, and more. The list never stops. 

But, what if you had some information, some insights that will make you more confident about your decisions?

Data based on trends in the market and the preferences of your customers will make your business more agile and confident. You can quickly measure results, adjust your strategy, and anticipate what will happen next thanks to insights. 

With the right data, you can make decisions you are highly comfortable with. Risks are not as high when they are based on insights. 

Insights help your business survive economic downturns

Businesses that based their decisions on data, trends, and analytics survived many tough periods such as the COVID pandemic and the economic downturn. If you are looking for ways to survive an economic downturn, the answer lies in research and data. 

Continuous research and analytics will show you what is trending on the market i.e. what customers are looking for. It will also show you what works on the market, and what steps you need to take to get ahead of your competition.

Based on insights, businesses can quickly change their strategies and address the problems that come along their way. They use data to understand the changing behaviours and expectations of customers and uncover opportunities that help them survive. 

Insights lead to more accurate predictions

The data-driven approach in business helps you discover insights hidden in the data. You can test your findings and determine how your future strategies will work. Of course, you can never be sure what will happen if you, let’s say, invest in and launch a new product. However, testing results can increase the level of accuracy and help you better predict the outcome. 

Insights improve your business’s capacity to scale

If you collect important data, you can use it to form concrete goals and make decisions to fulfil these goals. You can then use analytics to measure the results and figure out the next steps.

If you go into all this blindly, you won’t know how much you’ve progressed or which steps aren’t working. Thanks to data, you can improve the performance of your business in the long run and with it, improve your capacity to scale.

Insights help you monitor your brand’s health

As businesses become insights-driven instead of just data-aware, they continuously analyse data to keep track of their business’s progress. In other words, you can use insights to monitor your brand’s health. An insights-driven business compares the previous situations with the current ones, keeps track of the company’s progress, and learns new things to improve its performance. 

Insights lead to incredible cost savings

When you make informed, smart decisions, you are saving a fortune. You’ll be saving on products that won’t succeed on the market. If you use data to inform your manufacturing process, you’ll be saving on unnecessary materials and mistakes that can cost a lot to fix later. If you use data to guide your marketing strategy, you’d be allocating funds to what really works and save a fortune on ads and other materials that won’t. There are many ways to avoid costly mistakes in business, but data insights are the most effective way. 

Insights build employee loyalty and boost their productivity

Employees want their employers to be clear and straightforward. You can’t expect them to work well unless you share information about your goals and the process that will help you meet them. 

When you make decisions based on insights, you have a very clear rationale behind your decisions. This means that you won’t give your employees vague guidelines or guess about the outcome of their work. Essentially, fact-based discussions help teams avoid breakdowns in communication, misunderstandings, or mistakes. 

Since you’ll be sharing the expected outcome with your team, outcome based on data, they’ll know what to strive to achieve and feel more accomplished once they do. In return, your team will be more loyal to your company, more productive, and happier to work for you.

Is your business insights-driven?

Based on what you learned here, would you say that your business is insights-driven or simply data-aware? The idea is to base your decisions on accurate, useful data. Whenever you can capture information, analyse it and use it to improve your decisions, you should go for it. This is what makes a business insights-driven. Of course, this is a work in progress, so be prepared to do tons of research and endless analysis. It takes time, money, and a lot of work, but in the end, it’s the safest path to business success.