7 Reasons to Use Big Data When You Have a Small Business

Big data can give you the edge you need to beat the competition and grow your business. But first, for the uninitiated, what exactly is big data? Big data is all of the information you can glean about your customers and your business on a day to day basis. When properly utilized and analyzed, this data can give you valuable insights into your company. It can help you to strategize and make more informed business decisions.

Here are seven reasons to use big data when you have a small business:

Get a Better Understanding of your Customers

Big data can tell you a lot about what makes your customers tick. With information from your own website, from social media platforms and from other publicly available online sources, you can develop an understanding of your customers that goes beyond a non-specific profile. It can really help you to segment your audience and develop your business around them and their needs.

Develop More Effective Marketing Campaigns

With a better understanding of your customers – how and when they shop, what they value, etc. – you can develop more effective marketing campaigns and reduce your customer acquisition costs. Big data can help you decide when, where and how to target your potential customers and the content that will work best.

Innovate Around Products

Particularly for online products and services, user data can help you to understand what works and what doesn’t. How long are your customers using your product? What switches them off? And what keeps them engaged? With this information, you can enhance existing products and make new products that work as well as they can do for your customers.

Move Quickly to Capitalise on Insights

As a small business, you’re uniquely placed to move quickly and enjoy closer customer relations than one of the big corporations. With big data on your side, you can speedily capitalize on the insights gained, putting them into practice and putting products to market before your bigger competitors have time to act.

Optimize your Customer’s UX

Big data gives you an insight into a customer’s journey and user experience. How do they meet your brand? How do they travel through your website? How long does it take to convert them into a sale? With this information, you can detect sticking points in the journey from impression to conversion and make improvements along the way.

Improve Your Operations

By looking at all of the operational data your company has collected over the years and analyzing it effectively, you can make your operations much more streamlined. Big data can help you to predict how many customers you’re likely to have on a summer weekend and help you to staff your retail outlets accordingly. It can inform your prices during sales and even help you make better purchasing decisions.

Don’t Get Left Behind

This is a commonly argued trope with every new development in the digital world. However, big data does make a big difference to companies. For those who don’t see the hurry in analyzing all of the data at their fingertips, the worry is that their competitors are already one step ahead. They will be getting the insights to run a more cost-effective, customer centered and profitable company, leaving their peers far behind.

The benefits of big data are clear but many small businesses are deterred away from this level of analytics for fear of the time and the money it will cost them. However, those that do take the plunge are often pleasantly surprised in both regards, particularly when their business moves from strength to strength on the back of the insights they have gained.

About the Author

Sarah Kearns is a hard working mother of three daughters. She is a Senior Communications Manager for BizDb, an online resource with information about businesses in the UK. She loves cooking, reading history books and writing about green living.

 

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Comments

  1. Hello,
    This article simply restates the typical use cases for Big Data. Big Data implementations are expensive and this article does not even begin to discuss how a small business might start the process in a fashion that would be cost effective. Being a Data Scientist and Big Data person and also running my own small business gives me tremendous insight into these problems. I would flat out say that most small businesses could not justify a Big Data initiative nor would the benefits provide a positive ROI.

  2. hello,
    I’m quite agree with M.Emary comment, but saying “big” data would not benefits small businesses is like saying KPMG accounting audit is not good for small businesses… you can choose “big” data project according to your investment capacity
    N.R

  3. Thanks for sharing this. I think I will now consider to use big data. I think that all that you said in this article will definitely improve my business.

  4. What really is positive is that the internet is allowing SME’s access to data which previously would have only been available to large corporates.

    Hopefully it means that more businesses will be able to make a success of their services using the data.