No matter what your job entails, we know you’re busy — which means the last thing you need is to spend extra time in your day sorting through complex data in order to make the crucial decisions that keep your organization running smoothly. However, those mountains of data don’t have to be overwhelming. Thanks to the analytics features in Business Intelligence (BI) software, you can transform your organization’s valuable information into simple visualizations that tell powerful stories. And while every business needs different things from their data, here are three examples of visualizations that can have a tremendous impact on both your productivity and your bottom line.

1: Key Performance Indicators
Let’s start out simple. Almost every decision you make for your business revolves around whether or not you’re hitting your goals in terms of unit sales, overall revenue, trials downloaded, or however else you determine success in your line of work. By connecting a spreadsheet or data source that tracks this Key Performance Indicator (KPI) to a dashboard, you can provide a real-time gauge of success to your entire team. Pick a style of graph that best works for you and make sure it has a clear marker of your goal. This can be a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly goal — or you can even create a dashboard that visualizes all of these. Then, as you and your team work toward achieving your KPIs, you can watch as the numbers showcase your successes and setbacks, giving you live feedback on what is working and what could be improved in order to better serve your organization. It seems simple, and it is! Sometimes these quick, easy-to-create visualizations can be some of the most powerful you use.

2: Target Demographics
Who are you trying to market your products or services to? And do your customers actually fit within that target demographic? Having to look into these answers continually can be time consuming, which is where simple visualizations can help. By creating a line graph or bar chart that breaks out sales by demographic, which can be anything from age or region to gender or job title, you can easily and accurately track who your business is most successful with over time. Maybe that marketing campaign you created to target older customers actually caused a spike in traffic among a younger demographic? Or a specific offer you designed performed best in the eastern United States as opposed to the west. By examining these details in a simple, visual way, you open up a world of possibilities when it comes to refining your sales and marketing initiatives to increase profitability.

3: Marketing Best Practices
Speaking of marketing initiatives, how would you like to know where your marketing spend is most effective? For a quick visualization, feed your marketing data into a pie or bar chart on your dashboard. For example, you can track how many visitors came to your website via email campaigns, social media posts, Google advertisements, or other programs you run, and [then] place that data in a fluctuating chart that lets you know what is most effective. If you’re spending a lot of money on email lists but you’re getting the most traffic from Facebook, a reallocation of funds could have a big impact on your business. Similarly, by using a line chart to track website visits or other KPI over time alongside major marketing campaigns, you can draw clear, definable correlations between your actions and overall results. With data visualization, you never make an uninformed decision.

If you’d like to learn more about how you can use visualizations like these to empower your business, sign up today for a demo of Dyntell Bi, a cost-effective, user-friendly Business Intelligence solution that can interface with your data aggregating programs to enable both simple visual representations and complex, information-rich dashboards.