Big Data and the Small Business Owner
As a business owner, ways to grow your business and streamline as you go make for welcome news. Big data can do both those things for your business.
It’s easy to think that big data is just for the big players, multinationals and giants like Amazon or Google, but in fact big data offers measurable, practical benefits to businesses of all shapes and sizes.
So just how can big data help your business?
Big Data Offers Unmissable Insights
Big data can offer you insights into your business and your customers’ behavior, which you can then use to make good decisions for your business and give yourself an advantage over your competition.
Simply put, big data is large amounts of information gleaned from a variety of sources.
Big data can come from all kinds of places. Here are some of the most common:
• Website analytics;
• Social media statistics;
• Customer Relationship Management software;
• Online searches.
When analyzed; big data can tell you a lot about your business and customers.
You’ll learn about your customers’ behavior, what they like and engage with, what they ignore, and what inspires them to take action.
Using Big Data to Grow Your Business
As a business owner, you can use your big data insights to do more of what works and cut out what doesn’t.
Say for example you find a lot of visitors to your blog are arriving by way of a blog about social media.
You might choose to feature more blog posts about social media, and then make further use of big data to see how well those posts are doing in terms of sharing and comments. Large scale data sets offer your business extensive information that you can use to improve your business and better meet your customers’ needs.
Streamlining With Big Data
Big data isn’t just useful for understanding your customers; you can use it to understand your employees, too.
By analyzing the data you already have, from employee records to the way employees use social media as part of their job, you can learn more about your employees’ behavior
For example, are employees with a particular career background more productive? Do those who use Twitter as part of connecting with customers have greater or lesser customer satisfaction than those who use Facebook?
At the end of the day, using big data can help you learn more about the way your business runs.
Focus On the Bottom Line
It’s clear that big data is a useful tool for any business.
When it comes to implementing big data, it’s easy to get bogged down in the amount of information out there. Should you go for a big-name technology like Hadoop? What about the newer Cloud based big data technologies?
As the piece “Stay Focused on the Big Data Bottom Line” explains, the key to not getting lost in the thicket of big data information and choices is to keep your focus squarely on what big data can do for your business and how you can best utilize it.
By knowing exactly what you want from big data, you are better able to make decisions about how to handle your data and which tools to use.
Instead of getting caught up in the hype around big data technologies, ask yourself where you are going to start and what information you will need to do that.
Start with readily available big data such as web site analytics or social media statistics – this will give you the chance to see what big data can do for you without a big bill for new services.
Big data has a lot to offer you as a small business owner, helping you to grow and streamline your business, making your business stronger.
Stay focused on what big data can do for you and finding the tools you need to make the most of it won’t be a big deal.
About the Author: Tristan Anwyn is an author who writes on subjects as diverse as big data, business growth, social media, and SEO.
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