Ready to translate data into business value?
Your small business probably generates an enormous volume of data everyday.
However, when data grows too big and complex, interpreting it becomes very challenging and precious business insights remain buried and siloed.
An AWS survey established that 53% of small businesses struggle to extract value from their data. This boils down to complex data and a dearth of expertise.
With the best data analytics platforms, however, you can easily break down complex data to make it more meaningful and actionable. These tools make this possible by letting you track specific metrics to separate the wheat from the chaff.
You also get advanced visualizations like bar graphs, charts and other trend reports that help you pick out important insights and make more profitable business decisions.
In this article, we’ll discuss the best data analytics tools and platforms for small businesses in 2024 that can improve your financial performance.
Quick summary:
1. TURBOARD – Best for its extreme ease of use.
2. Ordering.co – Best for driver and delivery analytics.
3. Proof Analytics – Best for robust marketing analytics.
4. MyTelescope – Best for brand and sentiment tracking.
5. NLSQL – Best for businesses with relational databases.
Let’s get started.
1. TURBOARD
Are fragmented applications running rampant?
TURBOARD provides data connectors that integrate with your ERP, CRM and other solutions to provide embedded business intelligence and data visualization analytics. This helps simplify complex data and break down silos.
Additionally, it offers a native mobile application which enables you to generate reports and remotely access important insights about your small business.
By leveraging a codeless and graphical user interface, it provides a platform that you can quickly master and implement even if you lack a technical background.
Best features:
- TURBOARD lets you create up to four cloning dashboards, which enables you to compare data side by side. This feature helps you understand how your data has changed over time, to possibly reveal the effectiveness of business decisions.
- You can also use the software as a report server for your small business. More specifically, you can automatically generate and even send several reports to multiple recipients depending on various milestones to improve your efficiency.
- It offers a What-If simulator that lets you test the effects of certain changes before you implement them. You can use this to determine how a pricing change might affect demand, for example, to help you make more informed pricing decisions.
Pricing:
- No free trial.
- Contact TURBOARD for pricing.
Verdict
If you’re looking for a simple solution that unearths value from your data without needing special expertise, TURBOARD is one of the best data analytics platforms to consider. What’s more, it integrates seamlessly with ERPs, CRMs and other data-driven tools you may have in your workflow to give holistic business intelligence about your business.
2. Ordering.co
Ordering.co offers robust order delivery analytics.
It reveals comprehensive details about drivers and the performance of your fleet at large so you can make real-time decisions to streamline operations and increase efficiency.
Furthermore, it comes with an invoice manager that generates detailed reports breaking down payments to help you know your top-selling products.
Want to centralize data about multiple online stores?
Ordering.co lets you create an admin dashboard that unites data from several stores in your franchise. This enables you to gauge the performance of each in one place to boost productivity for your small business.
Best features:
- It provides advanced driver analytics, including schedules and a heat map to show the distance covered and routes taken. This feature can help improve driver performances to reduce order turnaround times for your small business.
- Ordering.co also provides comprehensive sales reports, which offer data about your sales funnel, sales team and best performing products. With this information, you can improve staff performances & improve your closing rates.
- You also get important business analytics about customer satisfaction, which enables you to collect feedback about the quality of your services and products. So it can help personalize brand experiences and improve customer loyalty.
Pricing:
- Unlimited free plan.
- Contact Ordering.co for pricing.
Verdict
If you need detailed delivery and driver analytics, I recommend Ordering.co because it offers comprehensive data that can help improve various delivery aspects. However, I’ve noticed that its business intelligence suite primarily focuses on order and delivery management analytics, so it may not be for you if your needs lie elsewhere.
3. Proof Analytics
What if you were able to forecast product demand?
Just like TURBOARD, Proof Analytics offers an AI-powered predictive analytics platform that helps you reduce business risk, understand customers better and sharpen your small business’s competitive edge.
With its Casual.AI module, you also get crucial go-to-market SaaS analytics that help you navigate new markets better and reduce your time to launch.
A Gartner study revealed that 50% of marketers get poor ROI from marketing. This underscores the need for Proof Analytics, which is one of the best data analytics platforms in 2024 for its robust marketing analytics that can improve marketing success.
Best features:
- Proof Analytics offers advanced and AI-driven marketing analytics which enable you to identify the most effective marketing investments for your small business. In turn, you can focus on the right strategies & channels to boost marketing ROI.
- It also lets you run what-if scenarios about marketing campaigns to evaluate the impact of hypothetical decisions before you spend anything. So it can help optimize spending, reduce risk and increase chances of marketing success.
- The Proof GTM manager for Salesforce integrates and automatically syncs data with all Salesforce clouds. This gives you more comprehensive CRM analytics such as advanced customer segmentation to help you target audiences better.
Pricing:
- No free trial.
- Starting plan: $29/user per month.
Verdict
Proof Analytics offers your small business advanced marketing analytics to improve data quality, so I recommend it if you’d like to get better marketing outcomes. Nonetheless, I’ve realized that its analytics are largely centered around public relations and marketing and it lacks operational analytics for business process efficiency.
4. MyTelescope
What are people saying about your brand online?
You can easily find out by taking advantage of MyTelescope’s advanced brand analytics that automatically tracks brand performances and consumer sentiments. So it gives you important data for improving reputation management for your small business.
You can also track trending trending topics in your industry, which helps inform more effective content marketing strategies that ramp up lead generation.
On top of that, it also forecasts business growth, giving you crucial information for sustainably scaling your small business and tapping into new markets.
Best features:
- MyTelescope lets you track up to 15 trending topics simultaneously in your field & provides automatic updates about topics that are also likely to trend. So it can help you reach your audience with a more effective content marketing strategy.
- It also provides a consumer and market trends prediction module which you can customize to meet the needs of your unique goals and niche. As a result, it becomes easier to identify and adapt to consumer behaviors before they change.
- MyTelescope siphons data for its AI-driven search engine from reputable data sources, including Google, YouTube and Amazon, among others. You can use it to perform search volume analysis to help you attract more organic site traffic.
Pricing:
- 30-day free trial.
- Starting plan: $49 per month.
Verdict
MyTelescope automatically tracks brand performances and offers important sentiment metrics and analytics that you can use to improve your reputation and build trust. However, I’ve noticed that the platform doesn’t offer elaborate consumer demographics, so this will mean having to manually segment audiences for marketing purposes.
5. NLSQL
This is a natural language to SQL platform.
In other words, it turns English into SQL queries, making it one of the best data analytics platforms if you’d like to interact with relational databases without writing code.
With NLSQL’s self-service business intelligence tool, you can free up your sales team from iterative report creation tasks so they can focus on closing deals.
So what else can you do with NLSQL?
Just like TURBOARD, it lets you create graphs, charts and other data visualizations from desired data sets, which makes it easy to pick out relationships between data.
Best features:
- NLSQL allows you to set what information employees can access from your database depending on their roles and other criteria. This robust data access control helps minimize insider risk and bolsters cyber security in general.
- It gives you a suggestion engine that helps you get started quickly using sample questions. Over time, the platform can suggest more relevant queries depending on your search history, enabling you to save time and improve staff productivity.
- You also get customizable dashboards that you can configure to track very specific data and KPI metrics for your small business. This helps you separate the noise from insights that matter most to you, thereby increasing efficiency.
Pricing:
- 30-day free trial.
- Contact NLSQL for pricing.
Verdict
If you run your small business using relational databases, NLSQL is a great solution to help understand and visualize data for improved and codefree business intelligence. Nevertheless, I’ve noticed that it’s a solution specific to relational databases, so if your workflow encompasses non-relational databases, it may not be a great choice.
FAQ Section
What is a data analytics tool?
It refers to any software or technology that lets you analyze data sets to derive meaningful insights, typically with the aim of improving business decisions.
Many of these tools enable you to track data in real time and generate business reports automatically to understand your business’s strengths and weaknesses.
What are the key features of a great data analytics platform?
The right tool should be simple to pick up and preferably codefree to accommodate a variety of skill sets in your team and improve user adoption rates.
All the best data analytics platforms also offer elaborate data visualization tools and real-time data monitoring to improve decision making for your small business.
How do I choose the right data analytics platform for my small business?
One of the most important things to consider to ensure you choose the best data analytics tools for your small business is the type of data sets you work with.
For example, if you’re a marketing firm, I recommend a tool that’s purpose-built for marketing analytics so that you get functions most relevant to your workflow.
What are the benefits of an excellent data analytics tool?
With an excellent platform, you can scrutinize your workflow extensively and uncover and deal with process inefficiencies to cut out waste and bolster staff performances.
Furthermore, the best data analytics platforms will give you real-time insights into market and consumer patterns to help you improve sales and grow your bottom line.
How much does a great data analytics platform cost?
While prices vary naturally from one vendor to the next, you may need to pay anywhere between $20 to a few thousand dollars per month for a proven data analytics solution.
Exact pricing is typically dependent on how many metrics you’re tracking and your user base. That said, these tools accelerate business growth and often deliver excellent ROI.
Conclusion
Your small business’s market is always in flux.
From technological advancements to economic factors, different forces are constantly influencing customers in different directions.
When business intelligence is poor or lacking, your small business becomes slow to adapt to fast-changing market conditions and meet consumer needs.
A study by Accenture determined that 64% of consumers say small businesses are too slow to respond to their changing needs. Many of them ultimately jump ship in search of better alternatives.
So if you’d like to keep your customers and stay relevant, you should leverage the best data analytics platforms to anticipate your market’s needs. In particular, I recommend TURBOARD for its smooth learning curve.
Click here to schedule your free TURBOARD demo to learn how it improves market forecasting and makes you more resilient.
With this platform, you can level the playing field with advanced business intelligence that enables you to compete with the heavyweights of your industry.