3 Ways BI Increases Your Profits

By now we’re sure you’ve heard about Business Intelligence, or BI. Everyone is saying that it can help your business and streamline your processes. Perhaps you're on the fence about it? Maybe you don't know enough about it to make a decision? Let us break it down into the simplest form for you… Business Intelligence is an umbrella term that refers to a variety of software applications used to analyse an organisation's raw data. Now that you know what it is, you may ask if it's really worth the money? The answer is, YES! and here’s why. 

BI allows your decisions to be driven by data

When you are the one making day-to-day decisions about where your company is heading, or where to best spend your money, it can become a stressful roller coaster. Sometimes you just have a hunch...which can be very wrong. Other times decisions are made based on anger or personal issues, or even out of fear.

With a quality Business Intelligence software in place, you’ll never have to speculate again about whether or not to trust your gut. BI enables you to get well-organised and detailed data that allows you to move in the right direction based on hard facts. Having that ability arguably leads to better informed business decisions. Having consolidated facts about your business helps to also make very specific adjustments. For example, you might find that one of your products or services isn't selling well and choose to stop offering that product, or make an adjustment to it.

The real beauty of BI is its ability to help you get to know your customers better. What are they buying? How often are they returning? This allows you to increase opportunities for your high-value customers. Business Intelligence can improve profits in all of these scenarios.

BI data helps you decide where to cut costs

It’s the question we all want the answer to… how can we improve profits? Well the answer lies in Business Intelligence. The reason for this? it helps you find out where you can cut costs. It’s simple common sense… if your expenses are less, your profits immediately go up. The data you receive from using BI is packaged in a format that's easy to read. You can even do a query search to find specific information. When you evaluate your data, you can find out what isn't working efficiently and fix it. You can learn which products or services are not selling and stop providing them. Sometimes, you will discover that you can cut costs by using another manufacturer, or offering a more tailored service based on your customers needs. There are innumerable places where BI can help you cut costs, and thus, improve your profits.

Some of the BI products we offer

Greater insights into consumer behaviour

One of the main advantages of investing in BI and skilled personnel is the fact that it will boost your ability to analyse the current consumer buying trends. Like any business, once you understand what your consumers are buying, you can use this information to develop products that match the current consumption trends and consequently improve your profitability.

BI can be used to enable informed business decisions across the whole business, increasing operational and strategic efficiency on both a micro and macro level. Whether you are looking to to gain an accurate view of sales or profit figures in real-time, consolidate critical reports, drill-down deeper into the numbers or set business priorities and goals at a top level, implementing an effective BI tool can help you make the right decisions at the right time.

To learn more about the Business Intelligence products we offer at Advance get in touch with us today!

Why Updating Your Website Is A Must

There’s nothing like a bit of spring cleaning around the house that may make you stop to think about spring cleaning when it comes to your own business. I know what your thinking and no… i’m not talking about cleaning out those old files and organising your paperwork.

I’m sure at some point you’ve stopped to think about whether or not you should update your companies website. The truth is, you shouldn’t wait until spring to jump in and make some changes. What we all know is that people make snap judgements. It takes only 1/10th of a second to form a first impression about a person, and websites are no different. It takes about 50 milliseconds (that’s 0.05 seconds) for users to form an opinion about your website that determines whether they like your site or not, whether they’ll stay or leave, whether they’ll convert or not.

There are many benefits of updating your website! Here are at Advance we wanted to run you through a few…

Building Trust

You may not be aware, however continually ensuring your website is up-to-date will help you to build trust between your customers and also search engines like Google. If you’ve ever visited a website that looks out-of-date with old formatting and website design, you’ll probably feel a bit hesitant to look much further. Just like fashion changes, so does website design. It’s for this reason, search engines like Google negatively rank sites that don’t provide a good user experience to visitors (this results in less web traffic). When your website feels current and with the times, your visitors will feel more comfortable hanging around the site. This will hopefully lead to sales and repeat sales!

It’s no secret that users are on their phones much more than they used to be… arguably more so than they are on a desktop computer! People are wanting their content available on the go, whether that is for social media, news, helpful information, or shopping. By updating your website to accommodate for mobile-viewing of your website, you are making it easy and enjoyable for potential customers to view your website. The more views you get the better chances you’ll have of turning window shoppers into customers, and ultimately getting more sales. It’s really not rocket science, yet so many businesses are not placing an emphasis on this!

Website Experience

Besides all the technical advantages of updating your website, a little face lift will do wonders for the way people feel about your website. When it is up to date, enjoyable to look at and navigate, your visitors will like visiting because it was a good experience! The easier you can make your website to navigate, the more likely they will be to stick around and return.

Here’s some examples of some well put together websites:

Faster Load Times

One way to know whether your website needs updating is to check out a website analyser like Pingdom. Programs like Pingdom help you test your website’s performance with more info on your page size, the composition and various aspects of speed. If your website analysis shows that our website is slow, sorry to break it to you but it’s time to make some changes!

With the proper amount of bandwidth, and as you are properly optimising your website, you can give your customers a website that loads quickly. This will allow them to browse and shop freely! And as a bonus, it will once again give you more credibility when it comes to search engine ranking.

Here at Advance we have sound experience in website development and maintenance. If some ‘spring cleaning’ is what you need, get in touch with our team today!