It is difficult to avoid today’s talk about Big Data, particularly when it comes to using big data for small businesses. To compete and survive in today’s market; small businesses need the same tools that larger companies use. You might think that they can’t afford big data or it is only for the giants. However, that’s not the truth! Big data isn’t only for massive corporations. Small businesses can also use big data to increase their company’s success.
Big data is very useful for small businesses as it can give you the edge that you need to beat the competition and dominate the market. It can give you valuable insights into your business when properly used and analyzed. Most of all, big data can help you strategize and make more informed decisions about the business.
Here are some of the great ways in which big data can help small businesses.
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1. Track your leads
The first thing you need to know is where your existing customers came from. Once you know what made it successful in the past, you can strategize your business accordingly. You need to track your leads’ origins – as for whether they are from social media engagement, email campaigns, online reviews or company blogs. Armed with such data, you can allocate more budget towards those sources or channels.
2. Increase customer insight
You don’t need a team of data scientists or fancy software to get customer insights. Many small businesses can extract data from their website in order to acquire specific information. It is one of the best ways to make smarter business decisions.
3. Design effective market campaigns
You can develop more effective campaigns once you have a better understanding of your target customers, thereby reducing acquisition costs of customers. Big data can help you make a decision on when and how to target the potential customers and the marketing content that will work best.
4. Innovate around products and services
When it comes to online services or products, big data can help you understand what exactly works in the market and how long are customers using your product.
As Martin Blumenau, the founder of Datapine, mentioned in his interview, “The best thing you’ll get to know is what keeps the customers engaged. With such data, you can improve your existing products and develop new products.”
5. Make use of social media
As a business person, you’re already connected to many people through social media networks. Tools like Twilert and Social Mention allows you to set up alerts and notifications when you mention a subject online like your business, products or services and any relevant keyword. Once you can track these mentions, you can customize your responses and conversations for building buzz, thereby generating more interest among customers.
6. Adopt marketing analytics
Marketing is the largest investment of small businesses after personnel. However, small business owners normally do not have the time to spend researching and analyzing marketing initiatives. In such a scenario, what you need is a way to easily access information from the data you have accumulated, and develop all marketing plans based on the results of data analytics.
7. Get the right analytics tools
You need a marketing analytics dashboard to ease the daunting task of sorting out marketing data and making it useful. The dashboard will display the relevant information. It will help you easily track the number of leads, calls, and clicks generated through online marketing product, and based on this data, you can develop better marketing campaigns in the future.
8. Improve your operations
By analyzing the operational data your company has collated over the years, you can streamline your operations and make them more effective. Big data can assist you with the product prices during sales and help you make purchasing decisions.
“Big Data is a gift for SMB’s to analyze their operational data easily and strategize their future marketing plans effectively.” – as elaborated by Matt Wood, the founder of Tech Inc Solutions, in a recent interview.
9. Customize your strategy
It is essential for a business to set up processes to track and maintain data quality. Accordingly, you need to personalize your business strategy to achieve your goals. You should consider certain goal-focused questions before you finalize any key performance indicators. This way you’ll be better positioned to target customers more efficiently.
10. Scope out the competition
You can use some free and easy-to-use tools like Google Trends to show how popular a brand or product is and what people are saying about you. Such tools can also be used to check out your competitors’ moves. This will help you in strategizing your marketing activities in a better way.
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Final Words
While the big data concept is redefining the business world, it is essential to know how to streamline strategies and avoid using big data in an unstructured way. Big data can really help boost business growth and enables small business to compete with larger corporations.
