With everything going on around Big Data, you might consider Big Data as a preserve for larger corporations with huge appetites for data, multiple data sources and even bigger budgets than your own. While it’s perfectly suited for large businesses, Big Data does offer even smaller businesses (like your own) with some huge benefits. Analyzing all the information generated online and offline can help your business make greater leaps towards success.
Most small companies are managed according to prevailing market conditions, gut feeling or intuition and many years of experience. However, today you have the chance to work with Big Data startups that give you access to Big-Data-as-a-Service (BDaaS) solutions with relatively little money or effort on your part. For example, if you are a small insurance broker, BDaaS solution providers can help you analyze social media conversations to find out more about what people are saying about converting a whole life insurance policy.
From that data, you can discover new sales opportunities and trends that you should jump on. In other words, Big Data offers a lot of potential for your small business, which more or less result in two distinct benefits.
Low to Zero Costs for Great Insights
Big corporations require lots of data to run and it all comes from various data sources. Collecting and analyzing all the data received requires a dedicated platform and tech in either the cloud or on-premises. These types of platforms are quite expensive; for example, the Big Data strategy implemented by the giant UPS costs about $1 billion annually.
It goes without saying that a majority of small businesses do not have access to such huge amounts of cash, nor do they require such a large amount of data. Fortunately, there are plenty of solutions available to you that offer great analytics capabilities. Does this sound far-fetched?
Today, it is relatively easy to collect, monitor and analyze data from various data sources in real-time, including sales data and social media conversions, to help you in making better and informed decisions. Some products, like Google Analytics, offer these insights at no cost and you can use the service to track how visitors coming to your website behave, as well as how much revenue they are bringing. In the end, the platform gives you insights that you can use while making critical business decisions.
Better-Focused Marketing Efforts
Small businesses should mainly be focused on the local environment in which they are doing business. While this is obvious, Big Data can help you hone in on the likes/dislikes and preferences of your main customer crowd even better. Get to know their preferences, combine that with a personal touch and you will offer greater benefits than your bigger competitors will.
Next, small business owners can effortlessly adjust their stores to accommodate these local preferences once they combine and analyze all the local data received. Using BDaaS solutions, you can create your own customized toolkit for optimizing the in-store experience of your customers. This will aid in driving product discovery, consideration and sales; enabling you to be noticed against bigger firms such as Amazon and be steps ahead of the local competition.
The algorithms used in analyzing data do so in real-time and collecting from various inputs, including keywords, geography and behavior in relation to your customer. Combine these with your local preferences, and you are in a position to better understand your customers and offer better solutions.
It is clear that Big Data offers numerous opportunities for small business owners. By using tools that are already free or available at low costs and local preferences, you will achieve great insights that will enable compete with even bigger multi-million competitors.