For a small business to be smart today, it should use Big Data. Data analytics is not only a viable choice for huge organizations. More and more small enterprises are finding data analytics integral for their processes.
Huge organizations have already embrace the growth of data and analytics. Last, year, an IDG study showed 78 percent of bigger employers agree that data analytics has the potential of completely changing how they do business. However their small brethren still are not reaping the same benefits of real-time digital interconnectivity. There are still many small businesses that are in the early stages of digital transformation. However, there is no reason for a small business to fear large data analysis. With the right strategy in place, there are a lot of ways to gather, analyze and make sense of data without breaking the bank.
GET SMART WITH HUGE DATA
Huge data and big data analysis tools have left marks on every industry imaginable, which include advertising, healthcare, retail, marketing, insurance and telecommunication. All data companies could know more about their customer more than ever. All data companies compile their online stores, purchase histories and more could be used to boost each aspect of how a company operates. Data analytics is not all about having unlimited information, but it’s more about getting high-quality information in a timely manner that’s specific to a business. Data analytics is all about knowing the right questions to ask to make the business better as well as how to have the ability of predicting future trends.
THE RIGHT TIME TO USE DATA ANALYTICS IS NOW
Huge data is the driving force behind the machine learning technology. The wellness and healthcare industries use machine learning algorithms to minimize drug discovery times and boost medical imaging procedures and accuracy. Organizations in marketing and advertising use data analytics for intelligent email marketing as well as content-aware video advertising. The following are ways of using data analytics for a small business.
1. Know the customers betters. Data analytics could help understand the preferences of customers and drive product enhancements. Huge data would show what customers are really doing. Use data analytics to know who buys the products, which could help determine who to target. Customers’ experiences and behavioral information from any kind of device could also be capture, including desktops, laptops, smart phones, tablets and others. Practically, there is no limit as to how to use data to know the customers better.
2. Make sense of Social Media. Large data could be used to determine mentions of a business on social media sites, which include positive complaints and experiences, analyze unstructured data to find valuable information to use to make smarter decisions moving forward. Taking advantage of every social media platform that makes sense to a business, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more is a good move. Use the platform to leverage positive customer experiences and make it a point to respond to customers who mention the company as much as possible. By knowing customers better and understanding the way they interact with various social media platforms could help find more effective ways of reaching them and sell products or services.
3. Build better marketing campaigns. Data analytics could be used to make better marketing decisions for a small business. For instance, keeping track of performance data could help guide the content strategy of the company. Also, data analytics could be used to predict the groups of people who will respond to the various marketing strategies of a business. Moreover, data analytics make it possible to know exactly who is buying, their ethnicities, ages, locations, income brackets and more. Having all this information and analyzing them properly allow sending the target audience the right message that gets them to buy from the business. Huge data not is not only vital or marketing campaign, it will also revolutionize marketing as a whole.
4. Set the goals. It’s important to define the goals when running analytics projects. The goals must be based on what action a business wants visitors to the site to take. This does not only mean looking for hits to the site. Website visits must translate into conversions, thus a business has to decide what it wants to track, such as registrations, downloads, leads, inquiries, purchases, appointments, new accounts, and shift focus from hits to those measures instead.
5. Embrace the Big data future. Already, there are numerous sources of information, and more are likely to pop up daily. In the not-so-far future, there would be many businesses, including small and medium size ones, moving their processes, products and other information to the cloud. Also, companies would get to learn more about huge data and what they could do with it and how it would shape respective industries.
DATA ANALYTICS TOOLS EMPOWER SMALL BUSINESSES
The more data that a small business has, the more it gets from it. Small companies may not have as much data as big ones, or as much resources, but they could still take advantage of huge data. In one sense, small and medium businesses are at a disadvantage. Huge companies gather so much data on a daily basis that even their own resources are considered huge data. No SML has as many data as the huge organizations. Nonetheless, they could find other ways of taking advantage of large data.
If enough small and medium businesses pool their data, they could make a bigger set of data. And the bigger the set of data, the more insight and detail you could get out of it. A lot of third party vendors provide this service to small businesses at present. The huge data tools have never been better than they are today. The amounts of information one could gather about customers and the ways of analyzing the information to drive innovation and growth to a company is remarkable.
Today is the time to start using huge data to transform a business into a smarter and more efficient operation. Stay ahead of the competition and take advantage of data analytics now to drive sales as well as boost business growth.
