Often the words such as data, information, and insight are used interchangeably, but these words are not similar, they have different meanings. Understanding those differences can help you tailor your program to benefit your business.

What is data? How does that turn into information and what kind of insights does it yield?

These differences are confusing right! But the distinctions are the simple ones you see how they work together. Let's see what their definitions actually mean.

What is Data?

Data is raw with unprocessed facts that we capture according to some agreed standards. Data can be in the form of numbers, images, audio, transcriptions, etc. While working on analytics projects, the first task is to go through the client's data structure or even normalize it.

What is Information?

Information is a collection of data points that we can use to understand something that needs to be measured. It is data that is processed, aggregated into a manner humans could read and understand. The common ways to present information are through data visualization, reports, and dashboards.

What is Insight?

Insights are gained by analyzing data and information to understand and draw conclusions that can benefit the organization while decision making.  These are the final outputs of the data in a usable form.

How they work together

The data, information, and insight work together to yield a complete analytics package. In an organization the data is collected in a raw manner, later it is converted into a readable format that is the information, this information is later processed to insights which are highly valuable in making big decisions of the firm. If one is absent or inconsistent that means it can affect the overall functioning of the company.

Impact of Insight on Business Decisions

Data-driven marketing is the latest word that is heard everywhere, but insights are more powerful than that. Most of the brands already have data but couldn't find the right insights. Insight can help in talking about the value of your business more than data does.

Any business decisions depend on insights not the raw form of data. These insights can make a wide difference in the strategies and performance of businesses. Great insights can help you overcome any kind of market problems such as competitors, and consumer behavior.  All kinds of evolutionary changes can occur only with the insights that can help decide better in the market.

According to Global Web Index, insights are four kinds, they are Human, Universal, True to Brand, and Targeted. In other words, a great insight reveals a story that is unique to the brands. Insights help the company and customers by coming up with new and fresh ideas.

The road to getting out valuable insights is through adequate research. Here are a few steps that can help you put information for the benefit of your business.

Goal: Set the right goal and objectives for the organization to achieve through the research. This can ensure you understand better what the company actually needs.

Collect: Once you're done researching, the next step comes a collection of the data, whether through quantitative or qualitative.

 Analyze: Here the collected data is analyzed to get valued insights. It can be about your customers, employees, products, and satisfaction.

Action: The last and final step comes where the insights are gained from analysis and these are put into action by the businesses which can help in a better decision-making process.

Now, hope you got what is the difference between data vs information vs insights and also understood how insights can impact business decisions.