Big data is a growing trend these days and is steadily gaining popularity outside of the business giants. There is a valid reason for this as it allows much deeper insight into the data than was previously imaginable. These insights give the power to the organisation, both big and small, which decides their very existence in the market as well as the apt utilization of their resources – the ability to make well informed decisions.
Still, startups are refraining from using big data for their growth. There might be various reasons for their intimidation of the very prospect – the seemingly terabytes or petabytes of data to develop a big data strategy, the costly big data solution which is far beyond their reach to process the mountains of data and get the valuable information, the technical competencies required and so on. These factors make using big data appear way beyond their grasp.
But not using big data is no longer an option; it is a necessity. Taking into account the amount of data that is generated every year and the key information they are missing out on could prove to be disastrous for the future success of the company. Today, the world is all about making well informed decisions and delivering customers with the most efficient and robust service. These can only be achieved by carefully studying the market trends, deriving key insights and building business strategies upon them.
Small businesses can use big data solutions as they have become much more affordable in recent years. Additionally, they are simple to implement and use and are many times automated. These surely eliminates the biggest fears of startups thinking of using big data. It also gives them all the reasons to use it as long as they know how to best use it for their business.
There are several advantages using big data strategy brings to the company. Some of them are:
- Identifying Key Customers And Their Needs – Big data can be used to gather data around customers and can be leveraged to provide valuable insights on each customer, their needs and discovering what prompts them to use certain products and services. This helps in providing a much tailored and customer-centric experience and enables the company to track customer’s digital footprint from the moment they were first made aware about the product to when they choose and buy it and beyond. These insights are quite valuable and can be used for coming up with effective marketing campaigns and improving the product experience.
- Predicting And Reducing Customer Churn – Big data can also help in overcoming the down factors that aren’t working for your business by delivering insights on why your customer is leaving in the first place. By obtaining insights on the average lifetime of a customer, companies can see a drop on 10-25 points based on churn. It can be leveraged to calculate what value the customer is bringing to the product and why they are ending up leaving a particular product, service or brand. This can effectively help the startups and small businesses to improve their sales tactics, products and customer interaction and experience to predict and curb the rate of customer churn and deliver on the customer satisfaction. This will help keep the startup relevant, competitive and successful in the future as well.
- Optimizing Sales and Internal Operations – Big data can be useful in obtaining the information about the customers, their preferences and what made the product or service work well and not so well in the past. All these factors help in coming up with a better sales strategy based on well informed decisions which is bound to work both in reality and perception. Moreover, big data can also be used to improve their organizations internally. It can help in more efficiently managing human resources or by streamlining research and production. Big data can also measure several internal areas of your business like finance, productivity and labor. It can help in identifying the areas that require budget cuts or in reorganizing the business based on big data analytics.
- Studying Trends And Expanding The Clientele – Big data can be used to keep the company up-to-date with current market trends and exploring strategies used by the competitors. It can also help in delivering great experience and improving communication with the existing clients and therefore, building new strategies based on that to target new customers. It can also help in deploying loyalty programs based on the customer’s life cycle and interests. The data can be used to segment customers and send target promotions. Social listening tools can be used to redirect customer response to your product or company and provide social logins for websites.
- Automating The Product – If the collected data is a product in itself, the collection of input data and the delivery of the output can be automated using big data analytics. Once code is set up to port data within a predictive model, one can also automate that model’s visualization and capitalize on it as a moneymaker. Even if startups aren’t interested in turning data into a product, they need to use these insights as a competitive advantage to make well informed decisions about their product thus keeping them relevant in the market.