Big data is no longer restricted to massive enterprises. Small businesses and particularly SMEs are discovering how it can increase the company’s success. If equipped with useful information, small businesses can also benefit from it to market to consumers, just like big companies do.
How is “big data” relevant to small businesses or startups? Nowadays, being successful in a highly competitive market requires the same tools for small business owners that larger companies make use of. Even with some missing departments such as data analysts and researchers, there are many techniques that can be used to adequately gather, analyze and share big data.
What is Big Data?
“Data collection” in itself is not a new term, but an intimidating word such as “big data” could leave room for many interpretations. To make a long story short, here’s a simplified definition from a digital marketing perspective: everything we do is increasingly leaving a digital trace which marketers and managers can use and analyze, therefore; big data refers to that flow of data being collected and the ability to make use of it. As might be expected, data remains just data if not transformed into useful insights and information.
According to Oracle, there are three V’s to pay attention to: Volume, velocity, and variety. With big data, you’ll have to process high volumes of low-density, unstructured data (volume) within a certain speed and amount of time (velocity), and includes many types of media such as texts, images, videos, and audios (variety).
Why Big Data?
Big data can give the edge to beat the competition and grow a business. Since it’s all about the information you can glean about potential and current leads or customers, the industry, and competitions on a day to day basis. When properly utilized and analyzed, this data can give valuable insights into the company looking into it. It can also help to strategize and make more informed business decisions.
How Small Businesses Can Benefit?
In addition to having a competitive advantage as a small business, big data brings together all the necessary information needed to develop an advanced marketing and sales strategy and reach the target audience effectively and efficiently. If the data is properly turned into valuable insights, it will ultimately help marketers to make smarter and more informed business decisions and explore many other opportunities as well:
- Product and service development catered to consumers.
- Improved productivity: research by Informatica suggests that 60% of each workday is spent attempting to find and manage data.
- New revenue stream.
- Real-time website optimization, since businesses will be able to personalize their landing page based on their visitors.
While big data holds a lot of potential for all types of businesses, it doesn’t come without its challenges that can vary from uncertain data management, data security, to the most important threat: analytics. Which is why it is a necessity for marketers to become fully equipped and trained in both digital strategy development and technical fields to be able to filter the abundance of uncategorized data into practical and functional information that could elevate their marketing objectives and help them attain tangible and profitable results.
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This post was last modified on 21 May 2019 2:27 pm