Beginner’s Guide: The Accounting Marketer’s Guide to Data Analytics

Today, accounting marketers have access to more data than ever before, and understanding how to use it has never been more essential. Data analytics allows accounting marketers to gain valuable insights, increase profit margins and guide business decisions for their marketing firms and clients. When you understand how to use the data available to you, it will not only be informative, but empowering, as you make strategic decisions for your business.

But what is data analytics, how does it work in accounting marketing, and how can it benefit you and your clients? Here’s everything you need to know about data analytics for accounting marketers:

What is Data Analytics in Accounting Marketing?

Data analytics in accounting marketing simply means using statistical processes to gain actionable insights from financial reports and other business data. When used strategically, data analytics can play a pivotal role in helping mitigate business risk, optimize performance and identify opportunities for future growth.

Why is Data Analytics Important in Accounting Marketing?

In order to remain competitive, having a thorough understanding of data analytics is critical in accounting marketing. Here are some of the ways that data analytics can help your marketing firm:

• Manage risks: Every business must balance risk. As an accountant marketer, you can use data analytics to calculate and analyze potential risks, not only for your own firm, but for your clients, and mitigate these risks moving forward.
• Increase profits: Data analytics can provide valuable insights to guide business decisions and help your marketing firm become more profitable.
• Discover new opportunities: Data analytics also allows you to identify new opportunities for growth. By examining market trends, historical data and other available information, you can identify areas with untapped potential to help stimulate new growth in the company.
• Optimize business performance: By learning from the past and applying these insights to the future, you can examine different components of a business to find areas for improvement, assess how current objectives are being met, and provide recommendations that can help improve your business strategy.  
• Improve customer experience: Improving customers’ experience is another powerful application of data analytics in accounting marketing. As an accounting marketer, you can evaluate data from customer experience surveys, client turnover rates and other metrics to constantly identify areas for improvement.

4 Types of Data Analytics for Accounting Marketers

One of the most important skills you can gain in data analytics is not only identifying what your question is, but how to answer it. In accounting marketing, there are 4 main types of data analytics designed to help you answer specific types of questions:

1. Descriptive Analytics: Descriptive analytics allows accounting marketers to describe what is currently happening with a business’s finances and create reports to convey that information to business owners.
2. Diagnostic Analytics: Diagnostic analytics addresses the “why” behind the numbers. Although understanding what is happening is important, uncovering the “why” maybe even more enlightening. As an accounting marketer, you can glean insights from historical data and current trends to understand the why behind your financials.
3. Predictive Analytics: Predictive analytics allows you to gain insights into what will happen in the future and create detailed, accurate forecasts of future business performance.
4. Prescriptive Analytics: Although understanding what is happening, why it is happening, and what will happen in the future is useful, understanding what should happen is perhaps even more important. Using prescriptive analytics, you can make powerful recommendations that can change the trajectory of a business, generate new growth, and avoid potential mistakes.

Tools for Data Analytics in Accounting Marketing

There are many powerful tools and statistical software available to help you perform data analysis quickly and efficiently. These tools are constantly changing, so it’s important to stay informed and up to date on the latest tools in order to remain relevant. Here are some of the most common data analytics tools used by accounting marketers:

• Excel: Excel is one of the most popular data analytics tools in the business world. From performing simple calculations to more advanced analysis, Excel is the bread and butter of data analytics for many accounting marketers and a great place to start as a beginner.
• Business Intelligence Tools: Power BI, Tableau, and other similar tools are designed to quickly analyze a dataset, create useful visualizations and easily share them with others. These tools do not require scripting knowledge, but can be somewhat limiting if you are looking for a custom solution.
• R and Python: The ability to code in languages such as R and Python makes it possible to create custom scripts to address specific questions. Investing the time to gain some competence with these languages will greatly increase your ability to perform powerful statistical analyses.

Master Data Analytics for Accounting Marketers Today

While data analytics has transformed nearly every industry, it plays a particularly essential role in the world of accounting marketing. By improving your skills in data analytics, you can drive real growth for both your marketing firm and for your clients and consistently increase your profits.

Keywords: Data analytics for accounting marketers, data analytics in accounting marketing, data analytics

References

Poddar, A. (2021, July 27). Data Analytics in Accounting: 5 Comprehensive Aspects. Hevo. https://hevodata.com/learn/data-analytics-in-accounting

(2021, March 23). Why Data Analytics Matters to Accountants. UNC Kenan-Flagler. https://www.kenan-flagler.unc.edu/perspectives/why-data-analytics-matter-to-accountants/

Accounting and Data Analytics: What You Need to Know. Accounting MVP Blog.

https://www.franklin.edu/blog/accounting-mvp/accounting-data-analytics#:~:text=Data%20analytics%20are%20used%20by,mine%20multiple%20streams%20of%20data