How can small companies benefit from Big Data?

Big Data is one of the trendiest terms you might have heard if you are in business. In the last years, it has completely changed the decision-making process, especially in industries like insurance, retail, healthcare, advertising, telecommunications and not only.

There is a common misconception that Big Data is for big companies. However, small businesses can outsmart their competitors by using actionable data insights to become more profitable and efficient. This article will help you understand big data better and show you how can companies like yours benefit from it.

What is big data?

Simply put, Big Data is a large amount of structured or unstructured data that is gathered from multiple sources every day.

If you do any kind of business activity, it means you are collecting data. The more digital touchpoints you have with the customers, the more data is pouring into your systems. These large volumes of both structured and unstructured data make up what we call Big Data. However, it is "big" not just because of its quantity but the value it has for the business.

How can Big Data help your business?

Does not matter which industry you are working in, how small or big your company is and how much is your annual turnover. You can use Big Data to reach the objectives your business has and often realize new opportunities and find untapped territories. Here are some of the most common ways you can benefit from Big Data.

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Improve customer service

Understanding customer and its behaviour is the key to successful customer service. Until just recently, businesses were heavily dependent on the "gut feeling." They had limited data, such as sales numbers, scarce information about the buyer and details from occasional surveys. The managers or owners of the companies had to connect the dots and base their decisions on marginal data.

Today with Big Data analytics business can fully understand the user and the reasoning behind their action or inaction. Where do customers come from? Why do they purchase certain products or services? Why they prefer certain brands and why do they switch? When do they spend the most money and on what? What affects their decision making and why?

Asking these questions can be crucial for the growth and success of your company, and Big Data has answers on them all.

Apart from improving customer service by considering customers' behavioural trends, you can also use Big Data to improve the product itself.

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Create better marketing campaigns

In the past, for companies advertising process was complete when the ad was published in the newspaper column. Once the text was sent to the newspaper, the company owners could only sit and wait to see how would it affect the calls and visits to the stores.
Things are different today. The data is coming from the brand website, e-commerce stores and social media platforms. With it, you can get all the metrics imaginable about your customers and people you reach with your ads. Instead of running marketing campaigns blindly, you can use Big Data to create more successful ones.

For example, using performance data will help you create a better and more relevant content strategy for your customers. You can track who is your audience, their age, gender, nationality, occupation, geographical location, interests, income range, and so much more. By using Big Data, you can see how the audience reacts to your campaigns and run different ones tailored to different audiences simultaneously.

Big Data will help your company spend marketing budget more effectively, have a higher ROI, reach and retarget the valuable customers and more.

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Embrace flexibility

Small businesses have an edge compared to big enterprises when it comes to making changes because they are small. Usually, smaller companies do not have a strict hierarchy and bureaucracy. It makes it easier for them to make changes faster and adapt to the new reality more painlessly.

Analyzing and using Big Data means getting high-quality information promptly. With it, your company can be the first one to make changes and adapt to the new reality well. In a practical sense, it might mean changing a website design based on new trends. Offering discounts and sales to the products that gain popularity in the short term, and generally thinking fast when it comes to meeting the evolving needs of customers.

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Make smart, data-driven decisions

Overall using Big Data enables you to make decisions based on the hard proof data and information. Rather than only past experiences, intuition, or just because other businesses do it like this.

You can use big data services to make smart, data-driven decisions in multiple cases when you want to:

Change your business model.
Bring innovation to your production.
Make supply-chain management more efficient.
Change the way you produce or display your products.
Open a new centre, store or the office.
Hire a new employee.
Run a new advertising campaign.

And many more. You can analyze and use data to make smarter business decisions.

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Reduce overall costs

For many companies, it might be the first most tangible benefit of using Big Data in everyday decision making. Your company can reduce operational and generally, overall costs of doing business.

By using Big Data, you can identify inefficiencies in your operations and address these issues. It will make your business more efficient and reduce overall costs. For example, the data might show you that you are producing too much of a specific product or part of the service does not bring the money in. You can then resolve these inefficiencies and cut the cost.

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Learn about your competitors

In the past, business owners had a limited opportunity to learn about their competitors. If you had a tools shop and wanted to know more about the competitors in your city, you had few choices. You could go to their website, see what they were selling and for how much, ask around or go there as a customer to check their customer service out.

Now, the information you can get about the competitors in your business is enormous. The data is readily available for you. You can use multiple tracking tools to see how many people visit their website monthly. See what kind of engagement do they have on their social media and find what are people talking about them via social listening tools and more.

Start using Big Data and compete with big companies

Using Big Data will help you achieve short and long-term goals. By making data-based decisions, you will be able to cut costs, gain and retain more customers, increase revenue and eventually compete with the big companies in the industry.

If you’d like to tap into the Big Data and use it for your scaling up your business find out more about our Data services and contact us for a free consultation!

Written by: Polina Boynova on December 8, 2020

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