Did you know that around 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day? These data are posts on social media platforms, digital asset downloads, transaction records, and many more. There is no doubt that data is all around us, and becoming a giant opportunity for businesses if they know how to take advantage of them effectively. Therefore, SMBs can tap into this vast amount of data to gain insights into their customer behavior, and market trends, and improve their operations.
This is where data visualization comes in. Data visualization refers to the use of graphical representations to communicate complex information and insights in a more intuitive and easy-to-understand way. By transforming raw data into visual form, SMBs can quickly identify patterns, trends, and outliers that might not be immediately apparent in a table or spreadsheet.
We all understand the huge impact of data visualization on businesses’ growth. However, it may become a challenge for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) since they don’t have the resources like larger organizations. One of them must be the limited budget. If you are on a tight budget, investing in a data visualization tool may be intimidating and make you hesitant
With the evolution of technology, there are many data visualization tools and techniques out there that are becoming increasingly accessible and affordable, even for SMBs with small budgets. They allow businesses to build interactive dashboards with stunning charts, and other visualizations as well as easily shared with stakeholders. To stop your fear of cost escalations but bring you huge benefits, free data visualization tools can help.
Using data visualization tools for free first and foremost, helps SMBs save several costs. Some platforms not only allow you to visualize data and create Dashboards but also offer more features that facilitate your data work such as Dashboard sharing with teammates, automated email delivery helping save time or integrating dashboards to other websites or applications, tracking KPIs, and so on. As a business owner, these are things you should consider when choosing the suitable platform for your business, ensuring it helps to streamline your team’s data works and quickly bring actionable insights.
Through data visualization tools, you can create interactive and digestible dashboards that can enhance communication among team members, or with stakeholders like investors, vendors, employees, customers, etc. Communicating complex information effectively builds trust with their stakeholders and boosts collaboration among organizations.
With the help of data visualization tools, businesses can analyze and understand key metrics such as sales, revenue, and customer engagement in a visual manner. Therefore, SMBs can promptly identify inefficiencies and challenges that need to be addressed and make quick data-driven decisions, leading to the improvements of strengths and weaknesses in their practices.
In the data-driven world, undoubtedly, most decisions should be made based on data. Visualizing complex data into visuals like charts, and graphs helps vastly answer the questions. Through real-time insights and trends, SMBs can yield insights and come up with ideas, and strategies for the businesses’ growth, rather than relying on intuition or guesswork.
Whether which industry you are in, for example, agriculture, engineering, tourism, finance, retail, etc, using data visualization brings you huge opportunities. Adopting business analytics culture to your business early means that you are spotting many more new chances before your competition. For instance, via analytics and visualization, a retail business owner notices that revenues of a particular product are increasing in a certain geographic area, showcasing a potential market opportunity.
As a business owner of SMBs, when making decisions on deploying a data visualization tool which is free for the whole business, it is important to consider the features and functionalities that the tool offers. Let’s start asking ourselves some questions first, “Are these features suitable for my business?”, “Do they help to handle data types we visualize?” or “Do they bring visualization options we need?”. So, research carefully before making your decisions. Some commonplace features you can look for include charts, graphs, dashboards, sharing, delivery, and other ones that boost team collaboration and productivity.
A good data visualization tool should be easy-to-use no matter if you are a data expert or not. When looking for a tailored data visualization tool, make sure it offers an intuitive interface and smooth user onboarding. This benefits you to create the visualizations quickly without getting bogged down in the complicated elements
Every single business has different needs when it comes to data visualization. Customization Options are definitely crucial since they allow you to customize your visualizations that suit your requirements. This may include the ability to change and style fonts, colors, labels, legends, and other design elements. Imagine that you present a data visualization dashboard that is hard to consume and tell bad storytelling, you waste your time and efforts analyzing crucial data. Therefore, don’t neglect customizable styling options with your dashboard. Dashboard design practices need to be focused on for effective deliveries.
Take into consideration whether your data visualization tool can be integrated with websites or applications. The reasons? We know that embedded analytics directly to websites or applications helps streamline your data analysis and reporting processes. Most companies choose to build their dashboarding system and spend tons of time and cost and it counts several engineers. Your internal team should keep busy with the cores. Don’t spend too much time organizing, querying, maintaining, and innovating your own dashboarding system. Many data visualization tools offer you this embedded analytics feature. Configure your settings and you can embed your dashboards into any applications, websites, or portals. By doing so, users can perform data analysis tasks such as filtering, sorting, aggregating, and visualizing data in real time.
Data Security should be a top priority, especially sensitive information. Some information like financial or personal information needs secured protection. Without proper security measures, this could lead to legal or financial repercussions. Even if you choose a free tool, you should look for one that has strong security features, such as password protection, data encryption, and secure data storage. It is also essential to check that the tool is compliant with any relevant data protection regulations or not
Dataflake is a great option for SMBs who don’t want to invest much in expensive tools, nevertheless, brings precious values that empower your business. Its highly customizable capabilities help you deliver storytelling and interactive dashboards to attract your stakeholders. In addition, Dataflake has some features to smooth your data work such as: securely embedding analytics to any websites or applications, automated email delivery to ease your working time, and many other upcoming features to help manage and collaborate with team members.
Looker Studio, formerly known as Google Data Studio, is available for free. This is an affordable option for SMBs who are on a tight budget. Moreover, it is easy to use with its user-friendly interface, so users can easily create and customize dashboards.
One of the biggest advantages of Looker Studio is that it allows users to connect many data sources supported by Google such as Google Analytics, Google Ads, and Google Sheets. However, if you want to connect to other data sources like partner connectors, you may pay more to use them.
One of the most widely used and advanced analytics and data visualization solutions for SMBs that can easily handle smaller data sets is Tableau Public. It allows to quickly complete clutter-free analytics analysis and visualization from small-size datasets. Tableau Public has a large community, which is considered a valuable resource for SMBs to learn from each other. This tool supports versatility that enables to visualize of data from numerous sources, such as spreadsheets, databases, and cloud services
Power BI, a powerful data visualization tool powered by Microsoft, may provide many advantages to SMBs with limited resources and budgets. The free version of Power BI offers many of the same features as the paid version, hence, SMBs can use this tool without investing in expensive software. Its interactive visualizations are also helpful for SMBs to create engaging dashboards so that they have a better understanding of their data and identify trends, patterns, and so on.
Like other data visualization tools, Flourish is useful for SMBs to present data through interactive visualizations that are easily understandable by audiences. Flourish also offers a free plan that is sufficient for SMBs, for example, unlimited visualization projects, embedding, and sharing dashboards. However, it also limits some features that you have to go on paid plans to use, which may be an obstacle to unleashing your potential resources.
In summary, data visualization is a powerful tool for SMBs looking to gain insights into their operations, communicate with stakeholders, and make informed decisions based on real-time data. With the availability of affordable and accessible data visualization tools, SMBs can unlock the full potential of their data and stay competitive in today's data-driven business landscape.
There are tons of practices and resources that SMBs need to focus on when operating their business. When it comes to deploying data visualization tools for business, let’s start with small things, and know what should be prioritized first. Free data visualizations should be a good start so that your business can reap the benefits of them. Then, gradually move to use low-cost tools with far more features. For example, Data anomaly monitoring automatically tracks your abnormal metrics that deviate from your setting configuration. Data Quality to ensure your data is accurate and reliable. Alerting feature also mentions that it keeps you notified when there are any unwanted data issues. A good data platform is one that enables you and your team to understand, manage, communicate, and collaborate together. Your data workflow management will be smoother and save you costs and expenses.
Dataflake is a highly customizable data visualization tool that helps your team quickly create interactive visualizations and deliver storytelling dashboards to your audiences. Additionally, secure your embedded analytics with your password-protected publishing, or sealing configuration to ensure the right audiences can see the right dashboards, etc. We offer unlimited free access to all features until May. Let’s dive into it, experience and tell us your thoughts
