What exactly is it that makes a business tick? In the past, it was the knowledge that people in the firm had. But fast forward to 2017, and mere human knowledge isn’t enough. It’s too slow, and it’s not able to make good sense of all the data out there.
Speaking of data – there’s lots of it. Estimates suggest that the amount of data being generated by the human race is doubling every year, thanks to the law of accelerating returns, and we’re now into the quintillions of bytes.
Those data are a valuable commodity, but like all valuable assets, they first need to be extracted and fashioned into something useful.
Here are some of the ways your small business can use data to disrupt an industry win.
Highly Targeted Marketing
As anyone who has ever run a business knows all too well, marketing costs a lot of money. It doesn’t matter whether you’re paying an agency or you’re going through Adwords, the cost soon mounts up, and it can become unsustainable.
Real time data analytics promises to change all that. In 2017, businesses are able to track potential customers in real time, thanks to a bunch of data plugins, and then combine this with business intelligence to figure out the best time to deploy an advert.
For instance, it might not pay to target a customer with an advert first thing in the morning, if you know that your customer is a mother who has to get her two sons ready for school. It might pay off, however, if you wait until the evening when she logs on to her iPad to do her nightly internet browsing. Real time analytics tell companies not only who their customers are, but when is the best time to strike.
Proactive Customer Service
Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a customer. You’re having trouble navigating a company’s website or figure out exactly how to use their software. Under the current setup, customers ring up the company, explain the problem they are having, and then get help.
But there’s a missed opportunity here for businesses. All that time that their customers are fiddling about, working out how their website or product works, they could be collecting data. If they did, they would then be able to offer proactive customer support, meeting the client’s needs in real time. Customers would ring up, expecting the company to know the nature of their problem and the company would immediately be in a position to help them solve it.
Higher Efficiency
Data are also now being used to enable companies to do things more efficiency. Take industrial engineers for example. According to Business.com, engineers are now using big data to look for ways to make processes in their factory run more efficiently. They look for any constraints that they can find, using the data, and then remove that restriction, improving throughput. According to the website, once a constraint is discovered and removed, engineers see massive improvements in the efficiency of their lines.
