Actionable insights are crucial to any successful business. They help in making strategic and data-informed decisions. While you can collect a lot of data from the internet by simply doing a google search, easy data is not necessarily meaningful. Therefore, you need to assign meaning to the data you've collected, and that's how you create actionable insights. In this article, we'll discuss what an insight is, what makes it actionable, and the features of a quality actionable insight.

What is Insight?

Insight is the ability to see and understand something or a situation. But in digital analytics, actionable insight means responding to data in such a way you can improve your company's performance through digital inventiveness. In short, actionable insights helps you put data into motion by indexing the activities your company will undertake in the future.

What makes it an Actionable Insight?

So, how do you know when insight is actionable? An insight is only actionable after answering a question that allows you to move forward or take action. It arises from conclusions made by one or more people after analyzing raw data. Also, it can be derived from big data due to large amounts of unstructured and structured data.

While you can make actionable insights directly from data, you need to apply analysis in some cases. This helps in informing necessary actions.

Characteristics of quality actionable insight

Insights are good for your business. But, a truly actionable insight must have the following qualities:

1. Specificity: An insight should be particular and accurate for it to be useful. In the same way, you get motivated by specific advertisements that offer detailed instructions on how you can do something; nobody will want some vague, empty promising insights. You should look at insights based on their completeness and accuracy. An insight that is incomplete or doesn't give a detailed explanation about something is not actionable. 

2. Context: It is meaningless if your data doesn't have context and framework. So, put it into context to make some actionable insights. You can set context using the questions that made you look for insights in the first place.

3. Relevance: The data or information you collect must be relevant to your business goals. If the data does not match your business objectives, it becomes hard to generate actionable insights. Therefore, make insights that complete a certain agenda your company aims for. 

4. Value: This is the most important characteristic. Your insights must have value. While something could be specific and relevant to a decision maker, it is unimportant if someone doesn't act upon it.

Nowadays, the business world has become more competitive than ever. Thus, actionable insight is not just a buzzword but more of an incentive to your company. It has the potential to improve your decision-making process, which in return, will change the future of your business. Would you like to leverage your data to get actionable insights for your company and customers? You might want to take a look at  MSIGHT, which is an incredible service.