September 6, 2018

3 Data Analysis Techniques to Expertly Analyze Your Data

True or False: You have a team of data scientists, analysts, and other professionals working for you, who know their way around a data set and can identify trends with ease.

Fat chance, right? Unless you’re the CEO of some Fortune 500 company.

Most likely, YOU are your data scientist and data analyst. Am I right? That’s okay, as long as you’re using your data correctly to dramatically improve your bottom line.

So, ask yourself, how are your data analysis techniques? Can you expertly analyze your data to identify patterns and trends that can help you improve operations and production?

If not, let us help by showing you 3 data analysis techniques to expertly analyze your data!

How to Analyze Your Business Data

Data is powerful because it allows you to reverse engineer a means of achieving your goals. But in order to start leveraging your data, there are a few steps you need to follow:

  • Decide What to Measure and How to Measure It
  • Collect and Organize Your Data
  • Align Your Analysis With Your Business Goals

All businesses, big or small, collect data on themselves and their customers. In your case, your data may be tied up in your practice management solution, financial software, Google Analytics, social media accounts, phone system, and so on.

Analyzing this data provides an incredible opportunity for you to learn more about your business operations and your patients. Using that information, you can drastically impact your bottom line!

5 MAJOR BENEFITS OF ANALYZING YOUR BUSINESS DATA:

  1. Identify characteristics of your most profitable patients
  2. Establish the most profitable price points for key products and services
  3. Determine which marketing strategies are working and which are not
  4. Better manage overhead by predicting needs and eliminating waste
  5. Discover trends in treatments, patient numbers, new patients vs. returning, and more

The ability to gather deep insights from your data and make actionable recommendations is invaluable. When you understand the numbers and the strategic implications, you understand how to take your practice from good to great! Here are 3 techniques to help you do just that!

3 Expert Data Analysis Techniques

To improve your data analysis skills and better inform your business decisions, execute these 3 techniques in your data analysis process:

  1. Diagram your metric flows to identify relationships.
  2. Search for trends, patterns, and correlations.
  3. Determine the monetary value of action and inaction.

Diagraming Your Metric Flows

It’s hard to find correlations and patterns in your data, if you don’t understand how each of your metrics affects each other. So, check out our short training video below to better understand your business metrics and their relationships. Then follow the instructions to diagram your own metric flows to help you draw actionable insights from your data.

Trends, Patterns, and Correlations

A huge piece of data analysis is looking for trends, patterns, and correlations in your data. By identifying these tendencies in your numbers, you can draw actionable insights that help boost your bottom line!

For instance, a trend is the general tendency of a set of data to change. The data points may vary slightly, but overall the data moves in one direction: upward, downward, or horizontal. Let’s say you’ve been running the same marketing campaign for months with results in your acceptable range of performance each month. But when looking at the data points over the last 6 months, you notice a downward trend. You may draw the conclusion that your marketing content is starting to become stale. This insight allows you to take action to refresh your marketing content for that campaign before numbers drop below the acceptable range of performance.

Patterns are a little different. Data doesn't always have to follow a trend, going up or down over time. A pattern is when data repeats in a predictable way. For example, you may overlay your Teeth-Whitening Kits Sold metric with your Office Visits metric and notice that your office sells more kits at the start of the year and around summer time. This insight allows you to strategize to increase your marketing budget around these timeframes.

Meanwhile, a correlation is a mutual relationship or connection between two or more sets of data. A correlation indicates the extent to which two or more variables fluctuate together. For instance, as your Website Visits increase, so does your Number of Leads Generated. Another example would be the relationship between Confirmed Appointments and Kept Appointments. Identifying relationships among your metrics is critical for determining the action steps for a spike or dip in performance.

The Monetary Value of Action and Inaction

Data becomes immensely more valuable if you can identify the value of an action (or inaction) in regards to what it could win (or lose) your practice in dollars.

For example, if you know your Lifetime New Patient Value is $880, then a visitor to your website who clicks on your call-to-action to schedule an appointment is roughly worth $880 (or keeps you from losing $880). With this monetary perspective, how much more likely do you think you are to act on increasing or simply improving your website numbers over time?

Attaching a monetary value to your data points helps to put your numbers into perspective!

Make Brilliant Decisions in Seconds!

By implementing these 3 data analysis techniques in your analysis process, you’ll make better, more informed decisions to run your organization more effectively.

Want to draw the most accurate conclusions from your data?

Click below to discover how BlueIQ helps you drive success for your organization through easy-to-interpret charts and graphs that help you make better-informed business decisions.

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