Visualizing Your Performance Data Without Having to Pay an Expert

Not too long ago the internet was constantly spitting out new innovative, literally breath-taking data visualizations such as the haunting portrait of gun violence in the United States from 2010.

Today you have to be lucky to come across them in journalistic pieces at all. The reason for this development is as simple as it gets: The free market’s logic of demand and supply. Or even simpler – money.

The corporate world has understood the value of visualizing data, making it accessible as a foundation for corporate decision making. That means the big talents of the industry still come up with those creative infographics, but the world just doesn’t get to see them.

But there is hope – for the public and also for smaller business owners who need to compete with the industry standards of making use of digital data, but cannot afford to pay an expert. Business Intelligence software such as datapine facilitate a way of analyzing performance databases and conveying the results to people without technical backgrounds.

Understand your marketing efforts

Marketing is one of the most essential parts of running a business. You may have the most innovative product or the best service, but without anyone knowing about it, you will fail – miserably.

Understanding which of your marketing tools work and to what extent is crucial to your success. Analyzing the available data is the first step. The second one is making it graspable for your team, especially to those who are not keen on making sense of spreadsheets. The best and easiest way of doing that is to visualize data.

There are a few things to take into consideration when creating dashboards if you want to tell a proper data story, even with the help of software.

Look at your audience

Ask yourself what kind of insights the consumers of your infographic are hoping to get. Which decisions will they make based on the data and how familiar are they with the context? An overview dashboard for stakeholders will have to look different from that of a sales team that needs to access data on the fly.

Display only what’s necessary

Time is money, so the quicker decision makers can get relevant answers, the better. The term “Big Data” is as much terrifying as it’s reassuring. The goal of visualizing data is to enable people to quickly wrap their heads around complex matters – and not drown them in a data tsunami. Any information that is not relevant to the immediate decision or its context – no matter how interesting – is noise.

Visualizing Your Performance Data Without Having to Pay an Expert