Big data is precisely what it sounds like – massive data. To contextualize it, businesses can understand big data as terabytes (or even petabytes of data). Mostly, big data has volume, variety, and velocity. Every day, every moment, and in every business transaction, there’s data generated. Over the long term, this data can be organized and analyzed to find out highly valuable patterns, trends, and information bits. These bits of information become vital inputs for the whole strategizing machinery of the business, with great benefits that span across marketing, strategic business management, financial planning, demand planning, etc. Let’s understand more on how small businesses can use big data to grow big.
Every moment, there’s somebody writing a comment about your business, brand, products, or your target market. Imagine the mountains of valuable information out there on social media networks, right from negative comments about your products (which needs an immediate response) to positive feedback about your products (which needs to be promoted). Because all this information is scattered and unstructured, it’s a Herculean task to analyze it.
Big data comes to the rescue, enabling small businesses with cloud-powered tools that help organize social media content, identify and report critical mentions such as complaints or positive experiences, and analyze unstructured data to find actionable business information. By tapping into valuable information stored within social media comments, brand mentions, and detailed messages, big data tools can transform the way you understand your own business from the viewpoint of end customers and product users.
Benchmarking against competition, aligning growth strategies with the pace of the market, keeping track of the market size – all these are critical strategic objectives for any small business. However, conventionally, small businesses only rely upon surveys, quarterly reports of big firms, industry veteran comments, and other means of unstructured and often contrasting information. Big data applications change that. For instance, QuickBooks and Compass are two applications that aggregate data for important metrics such as revenues, expenses, profitability, operating margins, growth rates, product category growth rates, pricing trends etc. These and similar benchmarking tools allow you to understand how your business stands when compared to similar businesses, market leaders, and in the context of the entire market.
Product design improvement is a critical area of concern for small businesses.
