How Are Businesses Using Big Data in 2020?

Special to California Business Journal.

Business is more complicated than it used to be. You had an idea, formed a company, and launched a product to the masses.

Things are different now that you have big data at your disposal. Reports show that 97.2% of companies are investing in big data. You can’t afford to run your business on less data if you want to stay competitive in today’s market.

If you’re unsure about the benefits of big data, look no further. Keep reading to learn the uses of big data and how using big data will improve your business.

Increase Customer Retention and Acquisition

It’s hard to market to potential customers when you don’t have insight into what they’re looking for.

Without data, your advertising and sales strategies are nothing but best guesses. You won’t be able to optimize your marketing strategies and increase your sales if you don’t have data to model your efforts.

You can use data to generate insights about your customers. It will tell you your customer demographics, interests, dislikes, and anything else you can think of.

You can use this information to create highly-targeted campaigns that specifically target groups of people. Doing this will help your business craft your campaigns to speak to the specific problems people face, and help them understand why your products or services will help.

Data will also help you retain the customers you already have. As you continue doing business with customers, you’ll be able to figure out their preferences. When you have this data, you can send them deals that they’re more likely to respond to and will spend money on.

Improve Operation Efficiency

You need every advantage you can get when thinking about the operations of your business. You can spend any time you save doing more productive things. Any money you save by increasing efficiency will help grow your business further.

You can do much of this through business automation. Robotics, manufacturing, and business processes are becoming more connected by the day.

Take a manufacturing plant, for instance. Instead of having workers going through each day to check on equipment, you can gather information with the use of sensors. This information is sent to a central server to inform you of any problems that need to be rectified.

You can also use big data to automate your digital processes. These systems can do everything from automating paycheck processing to handle your project management online.

Deliver Better Products

It doesn’t matter if you have great data about your customers if you don’t have insight into the problems they have. You can get these insights by getting on the phone and talking with your target market.

The problem is, it will take a long time to gather all the information you need.

You can make use of big data to figure out what your customers are looking for. There are several data sources available that give let you know what topics people look for online. The first place to start is with keyword searches.

You can use your keyword tools to generate a list of topics that people look for on search engines. You’ll be able to figure out what topics get the most searches, so you can come up with content or products to solve those problems.

Of course, you don’t want to target problems that don’t have a steady search volume. Trend tools will tell you what’s hot and which trends are dying down. If you don’t want to bet on a trend, try to find a problem that has consistent searches that don’t fluctuate over time.

Understand Your Competition

It’s hard to find an industry that doesn’t have competition. Every day, your competitors will come up with new products and services that threaten your business. You can’t ignore what they do.

You can use data to track what people in your industry are doing on a day to day basis. Now that so much business happens online, you can use tools to monitor the activity of other companies.

A great place to start with this is pricing. You don’t want to be caught off guard when someone decides to underprice your products. You can use data to regularly monitor the pricing of companies with similar products and price accordingly.

You can also monitor what your competitors do to get traffic to their websites. Competition monitors track rankings on search engines and let you know what content ranks. You can produce similar content to help customers and take some of that search engine traffic for yourself.

Manage Your Risk

Running a business will never come without risk. The problem comes when you dive into business and don’t understand the risks you face.

The first insight data science for business provides for companies is with your current operations. You can use your data to identify trends for your company. The models you generate can be used to predict product failures, threats from competition, and internal issues.

You can also use risk models to help plan future projects. These models will help you figure out the chance of project failure and potential issues that will arise during development.

If you do decide that the risk is worth it, risk analysis will help you come up with strategies to counter any threat you come up against.

Don’t Underestimate the Benefits of Using Big Data

It’s hard to understand the uses of big data if you’ve never seen the results of it before.

There are countless ways that big data can be used. Start using big data today to begin generating insights that will help you make better decisions for your company.

If you’re interested in more business ideas that will help your business, head back to our blog. Our latest posts will inform you of the newest business ideas that are worth knowing.