As intimidating as it may sound, small businesses shouldn’t be afraid of big data. As a matter of fact, they should embrace it and bring it to heel – so they can take full advantage of everything data has to offer and help their business grow.
What is Big Data?
Big data is a collection of data from traditional and digital sources, from both inside and outside your business, which represents a source for ongoing discovery and analysis.
To clarify it further, we can say big data is the digital input from all over a small business, including online activities, web behavior and social media network interactions, transaction information, financial records, and interaction channels, like call centers and point-of-sale systems. While the data on the individual level can be handled by your IT department or respective systems, it becomes a different story when they all need to interact with one another.
In other words, all your data in digital format is pulled together to create your big data.
How Can Big Data Help your Small Business?
In the “old” days, it used to be enough if you were able to provide outstanding service in comparison to your competitors. Once you reached that level, all you needed to do was to maintain the service.
Alas, those days are over. You might not be aware of it, but your competitors could be harnessing the power of big data to create a customer or user experience that is not just outstanding, but custom-made to meet each and every one of their demands and unique likes and preferences.
Nothing attracts customers more than that special feeling you experience when you are being offered a unique and personalized service.
Let’s have a look at the individual advantages that small businesses can gain from big data.
1.Understanding Your Clients
The beauty about big data is that it comes from every interaction you have with your clients. That means you are able to see your clients demands and wishes. You can therefore customize your products and/or services to fit the demands of your customers.
This will make them feel like you really care about them – an endearing factor.
2. Managing Your Social Media Campaign
So now that you know what your clients want – you have all the data in your hands – you also know how to appeal to their wallets.
You can use big data to create social media marketing (SMM) campaigns that will make them part of your online family.
3. Formulating Your Next Strategy
Businesses depend on the intimate knowledge of their customers’ wants and wishes when they start planning a strategy that will help them move forward.
With big data in their hands, any business manager or strategist will not only be able to map a path forward, but even predict the future – by simply analyzing the changes that have been noticed from individual users’ data.
4. Advancing Your Daily Reports
The traditional reports that come from a single dimension of data can become quite boring and misinforming if you haven’t taken other aspects into consideration, including combined data from multiple individual, stand-alone databases.
With big data – everything is connected: this creates a data world that is multi-dimensional, more flexible and paints a much more comprehensive picture of your business’ current status. Reports from such data environments stand out and make the “normal” 2D reports look out of date.
5. Staying Up to Date
The beauty about big data is that it is always current and up-to-date – on all levels. You and your managers will have all the information you may need at your fingertips, in real time. You can make instantaneous decisions and not worry about doing it based on erroneous data.
6. Saving Time and Money
Extracting reports from multiple data sources takes time and resources. This is especially true of the data sources are non-interacting or have nothing in common directly. Finding a third entity to match the two or writing a program to parse (convert) one into another format can be a costly affair.
With big data, there will be no such problems. All the data will be analyzed by reporting engines that can handle all your formats and present it to you on an easy-to-understand dashboard where you can do further analysis by manipulating the variables, and see the report respond accordingly.
7. Using Data to Stop Fraud
The good thing about analyzing your customers’ data is that you will soon be able to predict their normal business habits: what colors they prefer, the size and amount, their favorite purchase locations or websites…etc.
You can use this data to build your clients’ profiles. You can then use the profiles to help prevent fraud on behalf of your clients. You can easily spot unusual activities and then, either ask the customers to verify the unusual activities or simply deny access to the customer with the new “habits” until they can log in and confirm their identity.
As a small business owner always remember: big data is your friend.
