A data analyst is a professional who’s responsible for reviewing data to identify important insights into a company’s customers and how the information can help to fix problems. They communicate this data to the company leadership and team members. Therefore, a data analyst is an essential part of any business. As a business owner, you need to hire data analysts to collect, analyze, and interpret data to solve different business problems.
Your data analysts will play a pivotal role in ensuring that your business grows and succeeds. But before you hire any data analyst, ensure you understand what to expect from them.
What Is a Data Analyst?
A data analyst is a person who analyzes large amounts of data to identify trends, make prognoses, and extract data to help you make informed business decisions. Previously, data analysts were only found in financial institutions like banks, hedge funds, private equity companies, and Wall Street.
But today, these professionals have become an integral part of almost every type of business or organization. Therefore, you can find them in the marketing industry, healthcare, retail, insurance, credit bureaus, technology companies, etc. Big tech companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others also rely on data analysts to make informed business decisions.
With ongoing technological advancements, data has become an essential asset for modern businesses because every critical business decision you make is based on the available data. Therefore, you need someone who knows how to analyze the large piles of data you receive every day and make sense of it.
The analyzed data will help you to make insights that will guide your business decisions. This means that your data analyst is much more than someone who crunches numbers in your organization. They help you to determine how to use the available data to solve problems in your business and acquire new insights about your customers and profits.
What Are a Data Analyst’s Responsibilities?
When you’re hiring a data analyst, you need to know their roles and responsibilities so that you can create a clear job description for potential candidates. This is an important part of the hiring process because it determines the quality of the workforce you get and the overall success of your business. As noted above, data analysts work in different industries, meaning that they may be allocated specific roles, depending on where they work.
Nevertheless, the overall responsibilities of a data analyst are the same across different fields. For instance, every data analyst must have strong statistical and mathematical skills so that they can analyze data statistically, organize it, and present it in an intelligible and logical manner.
They should also have strong analytical, numerical, and technical skills so that they can gather, review, analyze, and measure data rapidly from different sources. Your business analyst needs to have a firm foundation of business knowledge so that they can easily figure out how to use the available data to solve problems in your business and increase your profits.
They must pay attention to detail so that they analyze data effectively while minimizing errors. Most data analysts collect data using surveys and data collection programs and tools. These tools allow them to collect large amounts of data, carry out statistical analysis, and interpret the data fast. That way, you’ll always have enough data to help you make critical business decisions.
For instance, if you want to know the kind of people viewing your advertisements on your website or social media platforms, you can ask your data analyst to review the demographics of your website visitors and the people who click on your adverts. The data collected will help you determine whether your ads reach the intended audience.
You’ll also know whether the campaign is achieving its objectives and whether you should continue to spend your money on it. The analyzed data and insights made from it will give you ideas on how to attract more potential customers.
Finally, many organizations have put together large teams of data analysts to help them sort through the tons of data coming in from multiple sources every day. Even small businesses are finding it difficult to handle the large amounts of data they receive daily, which is why you need to have a team of reliable, qualified, and experienced data analysts, regardless of the size of your business.
Thankfully, you can easily find professional freelance data analysts for your business, thanks to sites like Guru. You can negotiate with these professionals for a pocket-friendly data analyst hourly rate that won’t affect your bottom line.
