Ongoing developments in technology–especially the rapid expansion of cloud computing–have set the stage for entrepreneurs and small-business owners to reap tremendous rewards from Big Data, both by creating entirely new businesses and by finding ways to improve and/or accelerate the growth of existing ones. The range of such opportunities is virtually limitless. Here’s how to embrace the opportunity.
The biggest thing small and medium-sized businesses can do to improve their performance is embrace the opportunity Big Data affords to become more data-driven. What that means is instead of making decisions based on past experience, intuition, or gut feelings, SMBs now have the opportunity to make decisions based on actionable data points. They have the opportunity to use analytics to go out and learn new things about themselves, their markets, and their customers, and to use that information to make better, smarter business decisions.
However, embracing this opportunity requires the courage to change on the part of SMB owners. Most SMB owners have achieved success by having great instincts and making great decisions, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But in order to truly use Big Data to improve the performance of your company, you have to be willing to take actions based on what the data is showing. Harnessing the power of Big Data requires a willingness to approach it with an open mind and to make decisions that are truly data-driven. The key is combining great instincts honed from years of experience with a mindset that’s open to leveraging data points in order to deliver optimal execution.
The best approach for SMBs is to identify pain points and/or opportunity areas in the context of customer analytics, marketing analytics, and web/mobile/social analytics. Big Data can solve a lot of problems for SMBs by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of marketing programs and allowing them to adopt analytics approaches that would have been ROI-negative in the past, but it’s important to recognize that, while Big Data can solve a lot of your problems, not every problem needs or has a Big Data solution. Make sure you know what you are trying to solve and why before you pursue a solution.
Big Data opens up the possibility for SMBs to know more about their customers than ever before and to get that information to the right people within their companies at the right time to drive actions and improvements. Big Data can be used to personalize experiences across all business channels, do a better job of mapping the customer lifecycle, strategize up-sell opportunities, and increase customer loyalty.
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http://www.inc.com/partners/comcast/what-is-big-data.html
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