Big data is a term that can almost scare away a lot of small business owners. Just because your business is small, that doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of big data. For those that don’t know, big data refers to massive sets of data that can be analysed over and over again. Companies can call upon artificial intelligence to automatically examines scores of data and present business owners with loads of information or patterns, etc.
There are many ways that big data can benefit a small business, but it’s particularly handy at influencing the decision-making process. By utilising big data, companies can make more informed and educated decisions, leading to more success. Bearing that in mind, here are five ways that small businesses are using big data to help make important decisions:
Get more information on customers
Big data can provide you with hoards of information on your customers. For example, whenever someone buys something from your website, you have access to so much data. You can see how they visited your site, what they clicked on, and so on. By using this data, you gain more of an insight into your customers. You learn more about them, and you can use this to establish any behavioural patterns.
As a consequence, this influences the decision-making process. By knowing what makes your customers tick, you can alter certain aspects of your business. Going back to the original example, what if your data showed you that the majority of your customers come via a Google advert. Now, you can use this information to invest more money into your Google Ads campaign.
Similarly, you can see what’s perhaps not working. Big data might show that your customers don’t respond well to specific things. As a result, you can make an educated decision to reduce your investment in these areas.
Use real-time data to refine your services
The beauty of modern technology - particularly artificial intelligence - is that it brings you big data in real-time. You see statistics and trends as they happen. In turn, you can use all of this real-time data to refine your service and make it better for your customers.
Big data lets you see what individual customers are doing and how they react to different things. You could have one customer that always buys the same product, then another that buys multiple products but ends up with a much higher total. Both people are customers, but they use your company in different ways.
By using this data, you can refine your service to tailor each of their behaviours. Send an email to the first customer with a special discount code for the specific product (or the category their product is in) that they always buy. It’s tailored to them, and this helps you retain them as a customer by appealing to their purchasing habits. Likewise, send another email to the second customer with a discount for purchases over a certain amount of money. Let’s say they always spend $30 when they shop with you. So, their personalised discount can be for money off when you spend over $30.
You see, big data has helped you make these decisions by giving you personalised information on each customer and how they use your business.
View marketing
Big data doesn’t just show you what your customers are doing, it also shows you how well your business is performing in certain areas. Marketing is the best example of this as there is so much data available to business owners.
When you run a marketing campaign, you can look at all the analytics that explain what’s going on. You can see traffic sources for your website, view the ROI on your paid advertising materials, see social media engagement, etc.
By having access to all of this, you can make smarter decisions for your company. You might see that email marketing simply isn’t working for you. Nobody opens your emails, and it’s a waste of time. On the other hand, you get plenty of responses from SMS messages. Now, you can make a decision to scrap email marketing and divert some of the resources from that into SMS marketing. This decision is based on the evidence found in big data analysis.
Track your leads
How many dead leads does your small business end up with? You know what we’re talking about; someone might visit your website or provide you with their details, but it doesn’t go any further than this. You may even have leads that get all the way to the checkout, only to disappear and never return again.
Big data provides you with the resources you need to track all of your leads. As we touched upon earlier, you can see where they all come from. This lets you view the best traffic sources for your business website. But, you can also figure out when the lead goes cold. At what point did someone decide that they weren’t interested in your business after all.
You can analyse so much data to determine patterns through your lead database. As a result, you may find that a lot of your leads get to the checkout then don’t make a purchase. As such, you can make a decision to look at your online checkout and see what’s not great about it. Perhaps you’re making the checkout process too long-winded and will benefit from speeding things up with express checkouts? If the data points to this as an issue, then you can make smart decisions to counter it and convert more leads.
Develop your products/services
Lastly, you can use big data to develop your products/services. Collect data on customer responses to products, sales figures, and anything else that’s relevant to what you sell. This information shows you everything you need to know about your products. In return, you can use your findings to develop your products/services and make them even better.
But, the key thing is that you use data to drive these developments. As a result, the chances of success are higher because you’re basing the changes on evidence that you’ve collected.
That last line is one of the crucial things to take away from this blog. Clearly, big data is helping small businesses make better decisions. But, this is all because it provides you with the relevant evidence you need to reduce the risks involved in decision-making. Therefore, you can improve multiple aspects of your business, all by collecting and analysing data sets.