Data visualization can illuminate business insights lost in a mass of numbers using visual elements like charts, graphics, and maps. These tools provide an easy and accessible way to see and understand certain marketing trends, outliers, and other patterns.
When you have interactive visualization tools, you’ll start seeing the benefits in your own company.
Benefits of Data Visualization
The human eye is naturally drawn to colors and patterns, and pairing them with data makes it easier to understand how the data all works. Everything from art to advertisements is visual, so it makes sense for data to be the same.
As we combine data with visuals, our brain can easily analyze information that would otherwise be lost in copious amounts of data. Using charts, graphics, or any other visual to summarize complex numbers means you can make more sense of it quicker—and use the information to benefit your company.
When your business has the ability to quickly analyze insights from all of the information you gather you can respond quickly to market changes, uncover business opportunities, understand customer behavior, and more.
Data visualization also allows you to see and understand the connections between how things operate and the results. For example, an executive of a software company may see that one of their top selling programs has shown a decrease in sales in a certain region of the country. Looking at the bars and graphs that show that region, the executive can then start putting together a new plan to turn sales around.
Finding how business performance and functions work with one another is essential to success, and data visualization makes that easier to understand.
One of the biggest reasons to utilize data visualization properly is so you can capitalize on industry trends. The amount of data being collected from any consumer in any market is astonishing, and it can show companies specific behaviors and how those can work to the company’s advantage. If you are part of the medical industry, you can learn more about biosharing here.
By using data, you and your company can monitor key indicators in your market and spot shifts in that market as they are happening—or even before! This will give you an edge against your competitors.
Popular Tools
There are many tools available to help you interpret your data in a visual way. The right tool depends on your needs.
Entrepreneurs of small businesses may appreciate spreadsheet-based tools like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. These tools can create data visuals like charts, tables, and graphs. But these are not enterprise-level solutions, and may not work for you if you’re data file is too large.
If you’re looking for a Big Data Visualization Solution the best solution for you may depend on what type of Database you use.
Tableau is an industry leader for big data visualization and is compatible with many corporation-sized data sources including Oracle, and Teradata. If you’re looking for a big data visualization tool in a desktop app, Tableau is a great solution that can create a variety of charts, graphs, and maps.
Microsoft Power BI is an enterprise-level favorite as well and allows people to set up visualization tools that generate data on a dashboard. Users can set up the data to follow company performance across key indicators and visualize the results.
However, your database provider likely offers some kind of visualization tool as well. For example, Kibana is an opensource visualization tool available to databases using Elasticsearch. So before you sign up for a new service it is worthwhile to do the research and see if your database provider offers a visualization tool.
Your Next Step
Whether you’ve been using data visualization tools for years or you’re looking to get started, there are always new ways to visualize and utilize data. There are countless blogs, resources, and other tools to help you better understand your market, industry trends, and your consumers.
No matter how you try to use data visualization in your business, do it sooner than later. The benefits are massive and used the right way, the data can help you find more success.