Consultants in every field bring a level of expertise to businesses that can make a big difference.
That expertise helps companies see where they’re falling short, work more efficiently, and achieve growth.
This is especially true for data analytics consultants, who work with one of a business’s most valuable assets: its data.
Data analytics consulting firms and consultants bring a fresh eye and unique view to businesses. Their broad range of experience enables them to identify hidden patterns, pinpoint inefficiencies, and transform complex data into clear, actionable insights that drive better business decisions.
In this blog, we’ll cover everything you need to know about data analytics consultants. We’ll examine their primary responsibilities, the wide range of skills they possess, the tools they utilise, areas of specialisation, and how to hire the right one for your business.
The primary responsibility of a data analytics consultant is to help businesses obtain value from data. But the road that connects data to value is never a straight one.
When it comes to getting value from data, businesses usually face one of three challenges:
1. They don’t have sufficient or reliable data.
2. They have enough useful data, but can’t seem to turn it into useful insights.
3. They have quality data and analytics in place—but employees just aren’t using them effectively. (i.e. they need training and optimisation.)
A data analytics consultant can come in at any point to address those gaps and make transforming data into value a smoother journey for businesses.
They do this by fulfilling the following responsibilities in an organisation:
1. Understanding what your business needs and defining a data strategy that meets those needs.
2. Collecting, cleaning, and organizing data to ensure accuracy and reliability.
3. Uncovering trends and opportunities hidden in the data.
4. Creating dashboards and reports that make complex data easy for decision-makers to understand.
5. Building predictive models that help anticipate business trends.
6. Making sure data is secure, compliant, and well-governed.
7. Automating data workflows to increase efficiency.
8. Training teams to understand and use data-driven decision-making.
9. Optimizing your analytics tools to make them perform better and be more user-friendly.
By integrating data and decision-making, consultants enable businesses to save time, reduce costs, and unlock new growth opportunities.
Good data analytics consultants don’t just crunch numbers—they help businesses see through the noise to what really matters. That means knowing not just how to perform the analysis, but also what to look for, why it matters, and how to make that information stick with people so they take action.
They must be able to ask the right questions, challenge assumptions, and translate those insights into clear, actionable strategies that help organizations make better, faster and smarter decisions.
To do that, data analytics consultants make use of three things:
These are the techniques a data analytics consultant uses to get the most out of data. It covers the process of collecting, cleaning, analysing, and presenting data in a way that drives better business decisions. The core of these technical skills include:
Some of the tools that data analytics consultants use to demonstrate these technical skills are:
| Tools | Purpose |
| Power BI, Tableau, Looker Studio | Business Intelligence (BI) & Visualization |
| MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server | SQL & Database Management |
| Python, R | Programming for Data Science |
| Azure Synapse, Hadoop, Google BigQuery | Big Data & Cloud Analytics |
| Apache Spark, Talend, Alteryx | Data Engineering & ETL |
Without these technical skills and tools, raw data just stays raw.
What separates excellent data analytics consultants from average ones is non-technical skills.
The consultants essentially help businesses analyse the business processes. The data analytics consultants need to understand these processes themselves in order to analyse them efficiently.
A data analytics consultant needs to communicate insights, understand business challenges, and drive real change. Data alone doesn’t solve problems—how it’s explained and applied does.
This is where non-technical skills come into play. They include:
A great data analytics consultant doesn’t just analyse data, they make data useful, understandable, and impactful.
Not all data analytics consultants do the same kind of work. Some focus on specific industries i.e. applying deep business knowledge to solve industry-specific challenges, while others specialise in certain technical roles.
In general, specialisations fall into two broad categories:
Data analytics consultants with domain specialisations focus on solving industry problems by using data to improve decision-making, efficiency, and profitability. They have deep knowledge of a particular sector, so they can provide specific insights that a generalist might miss.
Some of the common domain specialisations are:
Financial analytics consultants create analysis that goes to the sales and finance team. This analysis can be related to the accounting metrics or can be around the revenue-generating processes of the company. These consultants produce financial analytics reports that support business processes like forecasting sales, reporting on quarter performance, highlighting the areas of growth and slowdown for the business, etc.
Marketing analysts help businesses report on the marketing performance and find insights to optimise it. The commonly create email marketing, PPC or SEO analytics reports of the business and help identify the most efficient marketing channels. Their analysis commonly goes to the marketing management team and marketing executives who use it to optimise the campaigns.
For SaaS businesses, a big focus is on finding ways to keep the SaaS users more engaged. If the users are more engaged, they are more likely to convert from free plan to paid, stay on subscription for longer and recommend the app in their network. The focus is on metrics like user engagement, churn rates, feature adoption, and recurring revenue. SaaS product analysts work with customer data, usage analytics, and subscription models to help you optimise your product—and keep customers coming back.
Online stores use data to determine what’s selling, what customers are doing, and the overall performance of the business. An e-commerce dashboard, helps online businesses to better understand the purchasing patterns of their customers which informs sales and marketing strategies. It is also very common for e-commerce data analysts to analyse the PPC, SEO, email marketing and other customer acquisition efforts of the business.
Data analytics consultants hardly focus on a single industry. While they may have experience across a broad spectrum of domains, they still specialise in the technical side of analytics. They build the systems, models, and tools that power data-driven decisions across multiple industries.
Their role is less about the “what” of business data and more about the “how”—how to collect, process, analyse, and visualise the data.
There is a myriad of technical specialisations in data analytics, but let’s take a look at the three major ones:
BI consultants turn raw data into clear, actionable insights for businesses through dashboards, reports and data models. They use tools such as Power BI, Tableau, and Looker to enable businesses to monitor performance and make informed decisions easily. If your business has a lot of data but no way to understand it, a BI consultant is what you need.
Data scientists go beyond reporting – they build predictive models, machine learning algorithms and advanced analytics to uncover trends and automate decisions. They use Python and R, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and create data-driven solutions that help businesses win.
A data engineer is the behind-the-scenes architect of data analytics. They design and maintain the pipelines that collect, clean, and store data so it’s ready for analysis. Using tools like SQL, Apache Spark, and cloud platforms, they make sure data flows so analysts and data scientists can do their job. They are the go-to specialists if your business is having challenges with bad quality data or unoptimized data workflows.
The process of hiring a data analytics consultant begins with punching “Data Analytics Consultants” in a search engine and clicking on the first result that comes up, right?
Absolutely not!
It actually begins with you, your business.
Finding the right data analytics consultant is about finding the right fit for your business.
So, before you start looking for someone with the right skills, you need to be clear about what you want to achieve with data. Are you trying to:
Once you have a clear idea of your priorities, you can then look for these things when hiring a data analytics consultant:
Look for a consultant who has hands-on experience with the data tools, analytics platforms or programming languages that will help you achieve your business goals. Someone who can work with data and solve real-world problems using data analytics technology like Power BI, SQL, Python or cloud platforms.
Technical skills mean nothing without a business context. A strong analyst doesn’t just clean and visualise data—they interpret it in a way that makes sense for your industry and specific business. Whether you’re in finance, marketing, SaaS, or e-commerce, they should be able to connect your data to the decisions your business needs to make.
The only way to be fully assured that a data analytics consultant is capable of solving your business data problems is by seeing how they’ve solved similar issues for other businesses in your industry. In other words, their portfolio. A good data consultant should have case studies, dashboards, or past projects that demonstrate their ability to solve business problems using data. So before investing in one, be sure to ask for examples of their work, client references, or real-world success stories to test their expertise.
A data analytics consultant bridges the gap between raw data and tangible business results, such that your business not only understands its data but also uses it. Whether you need help with data strategy, visualisation, predictive modelling, or team training, investing in a good consultant will open up new growth opportunities for your business.
At Vidi Corp Data Analytics Consultancy, we transform complex data into clear insights that deliver results, and we also train your team to sustain the value of your data. Let’s get your data working for you. Get in touch today to see how we can help your business with data-driven decisions.
