As time goes by and the business world leans more heavily in the digital direction, the challenge of apt data analytics becomes increasingly more important. Speaking in cold numbers, every person produces 1.7MB of data for each second spent on the web. Our inability to properly interpret these breadcrumbs costs the US economy $3.1 trillion annually.
But we all knew that data aggregation and analytics make an essential part of the present-day business world. The thing we would like to point out is that the benefits of complex analytics are no longer reserved only for the big corporate market corner.
That’s right – big data is hurriedly finding its way into the small and medium business sectors and your company can reap some very interesting perks by spearheading this trend. Let us take a look at some of the most important mentions.
Cutting operational costs.
That’s right – even though most small business owners hesitate to engage in more complex data analytic projects fearing the associated costs, developing this infrastructure makes presents more than lucrative long-term benefits. Namely, being able to process and interpret data doesn’t only allow you to reach a better understanding of your customers – these resources can also be utilized internally. By identifying the weak spots, bottlenecks, and redundant processes within your company you will be able to make the organization far leaner and able to deal with the challenges of the modern business world.
Ability to anticipate trends.
The success of one company, to a large extent, depends on the owner’s ability to forecast future market trends and make necessary adjustments to be able to deal with these developments. Big data prevents this process from turning into an expensive gamble and gives owners tangible facts they can use to make educated business decisions. And if your efforts don’t turn out to be effective, the big data will spotlight the signs and prevent you from making the expensive mistakes. This is a good moment to point out the recent survey saying that predictive marketers are 2.9 more likely to score revenue growth.
Using the full potential of IoT.
The Internet of Things and big data may be two different technologies, but, in this day and age, we can say they are virtually inseparable from each other. The main goal of IoT is to use various sensors and other sources to provide as much data about some processes as possible. Handling these data loads would be impossible without a developed big data analytics infrastructure. Allowing these two systems to work in unison produces very powerful results. Fortunately, the companies like HTEC Group have gained quite a lot of experience with IoT integration projects so you don’t have to build the infrastructure from scratch.
Improved customer service.
To illustrate the magnitude of this issue, we would like to remind you of recent research saying that an incremental 5% increase in customer service produces a quite substantial 25% increase in profit. Using the full potential of big data analytics to get the know the preferences of your customers can help you push your customer retention efforts way past 5%. Essentially, getting a sense of the complex sets of data the clients leave behind helps you observe them on a more personal level, notice their grievances, and patterns of behavior, and work proactively to solve problems before they blow out of proportion.
Building a rock-solid SMB brand.
Building a strong brand is a very complex process that envelops dozens of different channels and takes on a very hard challenge of, essentially, changing the public perception of your company. Keeping in mind the scale of such projects, we have to admit that gathering and sorting out the feedback necessary for assessing if your efforts are successful is very challenging. Big data analytics makes this hard job considerably more streamlined, putting the data gathered across different channels into organized systems that can be easily observed, made sense of used to make necessary branding adjustments.
More efficient team management.
Last but not least, we would like to remind you that the small business sector puts a very heavy focus on the efficient utilization of human resources. Keeping in mind the limited resources you have at disposal pushing the efficiency of your employees only a bit further and making them work as a fine-tuned collective can make a huge difference in your market standings. It is good to know then that big data analytics also casts a stronger light on your employees, lets you observe their strengths, weaknesses, and patterns of behavior, and thus helps you leverage these facts to make them work together better.
We hope these few examples gave you a general idea about just how beneficial utilization of big data analytics can be for the development of your small business. So, don’t be afraid of the eventual upfront costs you will be asked to make since all investments will be returned through increased efficiency, stronger branding, a better knowledge of your customers, and rock-solid CRM. The sooner you start leveraging these perks to your advantage the better – the rest of the SMB sector may still be on the fence about big data, but it won’t be forever.
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