Admit it, if you want your startup to survive in this fiercely competitive game then sustained growth is a necessity. In the era of big data, working around the clock is no longer enough. Keeping pace with rapid advancements in big data is the key to victory.
Big data refers to the collection of massive volumes of digital information that can later be analyzed by powerful software. It can be used to improve business processes in nearly every department within a company and create access to outer information of the industry.
However, the weird thing is many entrepreneurs overestimate the cost of adopting new technology and consider that big data as the prerogative of some giants like Google, Target, and Walmart. The fact is, big data is good for any entrepreneur to grow their startup.
As Duncan Ross, director of data science at analytics company Teradata says, “Big data presents many business opportunities, but you have to be prepared to pivot and follow where the data – and the money – takes you”.
Here is a problem we need to address in this blog: How can big data help in growing your start-up?
Understand the industry trends
Regardless of what industry you’re in, being able to study and predict its trends is inevitable. As an entrepreneur, the most economical way is to employ big data, allowing you to understand industry information. Google Trends is a useful tool that can help entrepreneurs to understand the developing trends within their industry.
Google Trends shows how frequently a given search term is entered into Google’s search engine relative to the site’s total search volume over a given period of time.
Google Trends is an economic tool for entrepreneurs to learn business trends on Google. The data will let you know what kind of terms and keywords are searched most frequently, where they are searched, and who they are searched by. With this data, you could learn the trends of the market and adapt to them.
Enhance marketing efficiency
Expanding the market and enlarging the target group are crucial for an entrepreneur to grow his/her startup. When the marketing budget is relatively less, how to transfer the limited money into the maximum Propagation efficiency? With big data, we could avoid delivering ad messages to those who are your customers already or who are least likely to be your customers. Using a customer intelligence tool, such as AllSight, could prevent your businesses from wasting funds on campaigns unnecessarily.
light is an AI-driven platform for managing customer data. It uses modern technology to link fragmented data into a customer-centric 360, enriching it with an intelligence platform. Marketers and entrepreneurs are able to promote their own products with a better understanding of target groups.
Boost internal collaboration
Effective internal collaboration plays an important role in a startup company, for it enables teammates to enhance communication and improve productivity. Without effective internal collaboration, a startup company could hardly develop smoothly.
With the blessing of cloud storage, the advancing tech of big data, teammates are able to share their working files, documents and other information. Google Drive and Google Docs are helpful in internal collaboration when working.
Google Docs for example, is a free Web-based application in which documents and spreadsheets can be created, edited and stored online. Files can be accessed from any computer with an Internet connection and a full-featured Web browser. Teammates can read or edit the document synchronously.
Generate a comprehensive view of customers
Since marketing is all about reaching the right customers at the right time, big data can be used to predict purchases, analyze customer behaviors and better understand the people buying your product. With big data, it is easy to get a comprehensive view of customers generated.
One of the approaches is using big data to predict the customer’s need in the coming future. In 2012, there is a famous case, for example, named How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did. Based on a teen girl shopping behaviors, Target predicted she was pregnant and sent her related advertisements.
Big data is also helping us to identify the customer’s buying routine. We can know clearly how often do the customers shop and what are their shopping preferences and trends. Thus, we entrepreneurs can send them some coupons and discount to encourage their buying.
The better thing is, with big data, entrepreneurs are able to learn their customer‘s opinions towards their products and keep them updated. Having the bulk information scraped with a web-scraping tool, like Octoparse, entrepreneurs can get help to work towards improving customer experiences. For example, after people use the newly unveiled Apple products, they often have their voices be heard on social media, like Twitter and Facebook. If Apple Inc would like to know What People Are Tweeting about Apple’s New iPhones, collecting their views from Twitter could be a good choice. Using a web-scraping tool, like Octoparse is easy to extract tweets/comments from Twitter and analyze the data in a straightforward way.
Octoparse is a free web-scraping tool that can quickly scrape web data without coding and turn web pages into structured data within clicks.
Overall, big data can help a small business/startup achieve greater profitability through increased efficiency. In competitive markets, you need every advantage you can get. Your own data is a valuable resource you shouldn’t let go to waste.
