Big data is a treasure for every business and can be a source for additional revenue after going through sophisticated analytics and data mining. Leveraging data can be the key to compete with your rivals and can be highly essential for small business.
Although a small business might not have a large volume of user data segmented by user interest, demographics, or other consumer behaviors, they still can use a broad range of data analytics tools and third-party software to help them make smarter decisions. Below are some of the common ways small businesses can leverage big data:
Use Social Media
Companies can take assistance from social media to identify their customers' needs. If your brand is on popular social websites, such as Facebook or Twitter, you can quickly determine how visitors are engaging with your posts.
As a small business, you can also check your mentions and contact your aggrieved customers directly. Using social media, small businesses can also reach their future customers and use online tools to extract a large volume of data from their web profile to conduct sentiment analysis about their service.
Social media platforms are increasingly becoming a bridge between small business and customer to effectively engage and form a community around a product or service. Although it takes time and effort to understand your customers and it isn’t something which you can learn with few interactions.
Understand Your Audience
Small businesses can leverage big data to understand their customer’s preferences and behavior. Equipped with big data, you can customize products or add value to their existing services and provide a more personalized experience.
Big data available from various primary and secondary sources can help to understand the negative and positive thoughts by a customer about your business or the overall market. Does your product emits carbon or comes in plastic bags? Maybe, you need to check out the latest eco-friendly trend and remarket your product to influence customer’s preferences.
Leverage Google Analytics
Don’t be afraid of this giant free tool, which can be your way to tap better opportunities. Although understanding Google Analytics is not something you can achieve with a few clicks, it is still one of the best tools to leverage big data. Using Analytics small business can identify the industry trend, track their visitors and have insights into their behavior
The tool also gives information about the visitor’s geographic locations, and the website they are coming from. Put some efforts to learn about Analytics, and you will be able to drill your audience’s demographics, interest, and age range to better target your potential customers.
Refining Your Market Strategy
Big data can help you make better business decisions. Big data helps small businesses learn more about their customers and their purchasing behaviors. You can also understand your customers' need and trends relating to specific age groups or locations. With big data, a small business can target a particular audience and easily get to the right customer.
Nearly all major social websites have an extensive database, where businesses can target their potential audience. Small business can use this data for their advantage by running Ad campaigns and creating sponsored stories. Features like Messenger stories are further adding more areas of advertising for small businesses to leverage big data and drive more engagement with the brand.
Identifying Problem Areas
It is essential for all size of organization to ensure that there are no leakages in the system that could lead to loss of productivity and revenue. However, many small businesses tend to ignore this factor while primarily focusing on sales and growth.
Big Data can help to locate such problems for small enterprises by analyzing their overall processes and providing a clear insight as to what they are capable of doing. It can also assist management in idealizing the situation and impact after making the desired changes and fixing the problematic areas.
Increase Price Efficiency
Big data can help small business to make effective price decision instead of going through a trial and error period. Small companies can effectively use big data to skip any negative impact of their pricing strategy by evaluating the big data from multiple sources and analyzing the customer’s behavior and response about price effects.
Trend Analysis
Digging into trend analysis and looking for opportunity is becoming very crucial to remain competitive. Small businesses can use bid data for the identification of incoming prospects that can help to increase their brand awareness.
Big data provides valuable insights into economic and industry patterns. It can help to understand the direction which the industry and economy are moving towards. With such enormous data, a small business can start developing new variants of a product or add value to their services to stay ahead of the competition.
Data gathered by the business can also help to understand overall industry image, whether it is improving by time or is the support from consumers declining. It can tell businesses as to what customers want from their goods and what is the specification that they care about the most. By generating advance, analytics reports, companies can develop more comprehensive and to the point strategies which can help them make optimal decisions.
Final Thoughts
If your small business is not taking advantage of big data, it is time to jump in. You don’t need a large budget, and you can start harnessing useful information about your potential customers using various online tools. Big data provides valuable insights and can be crucial to reach potential customers without having to expand your marketing budget. Besides, the data is freely available online, and it only takes time and effort to extract the relevant information.
As the demand for data scientist and data mining grow in large industries, small business and new startups can't be left behind. Although they don't process as large data as them, there are still enormous possibilities for them to leverage Big Data and make smarter decisions.
