The amount of money businesses spend on big data technology will increase by nearly $60 billion in the coming year. Most small business owners understand that in order to market their products and services to consumers, they need to understand more about them. Trying to make important marketing or business growth decisions without the help of big data can be extremely difficult.
Instead of letting technology pass you by, now is the time to embrace the power of big data for your small business. The following are just some of the ways a small business can use big data.
Monitoring New Applications to Ensure Customer Satisfaction
Are you looking for a way to appeal to modern consumers? If so, having a mobile app developed is a great option. Once you have this app on the market, monitoring is a good idea. Monitoring metrics regarding how many consumers are interacting with the app, how often the app crashes and the number of leads generated from the app is vital.
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With this data, you can easily optimize your app for maximum conversions and performance. Are you trying to learn more about application monitoring and logging? If so, you can take a look here for some helpful advice.
For most business owners, connecting with their audience on social media is something they are passionate about. Millions of people use platforms like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook daily. Finding a way to maximize the effectiveness of your social media marketing campaigns is easy when using the power of data.
There are a number of programs, like Social Mentions and Twilert, that allow you to get notified whenever your business is mentioned on social media. Seeing what context these mentions happen in can help you greatly when trying to retool your marketing strategy.
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You can also use the power of data to figure out how many visits you are receiving on your website via social media. If you are seeing a lot of traffic from social media, ramping up your marketing efforts can help you strike while the iron is hot.
Monitoring Customer Interactions
Providing excellent customer service should be one of your main concerns as a business owner. For most businesses, phone calls are one of the main ways they interact with their customers. Monitoring these customer interactions can tell you a lot about how good of a job you are doing.
- When mining the data from customer phone calls, you should look at information like:
- The demographic of your callers.
- The most common problems customers are contacting you about.
- Figuring out inbound calling trends.
- Find ways to optimize the service you provide customers.
Over time, you can use customer call data to fix problems and generate more sales.
Tracking Leads is a Good Idea
Finding ways to generate more sales leads is something most business owners are serious about. Developing a successful lead generation strategy is a lot harder than you may think. In order to figure out where your attention needs to be focused, you will need to pull data on where most of these leads are coming from. Without this information, you run the risk of wasting money on ineffective marketing methods.
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For instance, if most of your leads are coming from social media, then it only makes sense that you would spend more on paid ads. Tracking where most of your website traffic is coming from is easy when using tools like SimilarWeb or SEMRush. With the help of these tools, you can figure out where the best place to spend your marketing dollars will be.
Learning Valuable Customer Insights
The key to keeping your customers loyal and engaged is finding out more about them. Simply knowing how many long-term customers you have is not enough to keep them on board. You need to learn about what makes them tick and what type of marketing they respond to.
For years, business owners have been using a practice known as text mining to get useful information about their audience. In short, text mining tools allow you to sort through large chunks of data in search of patterns or trends. Often times, the text used in this mining will come from social media profiles and reviews.
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When done correctly, text mining allows you to hone in on consumer behavior patterns. This information will make developing successful marketing campaigns much easier. If you are unsure about how to start using text mining for your business, working with a reputable data scientist is crucial.
Making Product Predictions is Easier With Data
Are you in the business of manufacturing products and selling them to consumers? If you answered yes, then you know all too well how hard coming up with a successful product can be. In the past, product manufacturers had to use their “gut feeling” or “hunches” to decide whether to go forward with production. In most cases, this would lead to a lot of money being wasted on products that never caught fire.
Instead of leaving these important decisions to chance, modern business owners can use the power of data to predict what type of products consumers want. Large online stores like Amazon use factors like a person’s previous purchases to predict what type of products they may want to see.
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If you run an online store that has a plethora of products, informing users about each of them is vital. Using data you collect on the people who frequent your website will make product predictions more successful. As time goes by and your data grows, you should have no problem growing your bottom line.
Tips on Collecting Customer Data
Now that you know how important data is to the success of your business, you are probably wondering how to start collecting. Knowing where to start with data collection is one of the biggest problems modern business owners face.
Keeping up with the latest data-driven technology on the market is important. There are tons of online resources to help you stay in the know regarding the latest technology for business owners.
Transactional Data Is Helpful
Most businesses produce a revenue stream by selling products and services to the general public. Each time one of these transactions occur, data needs to be collected. Once you complete a sale to a consumer, you should know things like.
- The amount of their purchase
- The date the purchase was made
- The method used to buy the product or service
- Whether or not they used coupons
If you are using a point of sale software system, you should have no problem finding out this information. With this information, you can do things like predict sales numbers, figure out how successful online coupon campaigns are and how much your typical customer is spending.
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Monitoring Marketing Analytics
Having a functional and engaging website is essential for any modern business trying to get ahead. As your website starts to attract more visitors, you need to monitor marketing analytics closely. Google Analytics provides you with lots of data regarding the demographics of your website visitors.
You can also use website heatmaps to figure out which parts of the website are generating the most attention. As you start to get a big picture view of where your visitors are coming from and what they are responding to, you can optimize marketing campaigns. There are tons of programs and plugins on the market designed to help you analyze website visitor data quickly and correctly.
Reel Consumers in WIth Rewards Programs
One of the biggest challenges you will face as a business owner is finding a way to get consumers to hand over their information. Most people keep their personal information a closely guarded secret and for good reason. All you really need to find out more about a consumer is their name and email address.
If you want to get this information, you need to think about offering the consumer in question something for their trouble. Developing a customer rewards program and requiring people to provide their name and email to sign up is a good idea. Not only will you be able to use this information to optimize the way you approach marketing to your audience, customers will also be able to benefit from the discounts you are offering.
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Before you start to offer a rewards program, take a minute to figure out what your audience wants. Performing a poll on social media can help you get this information in a hurry. Ignoring the need for this type of research may lead to you offering rewards that don’t entice your audience.
Seek Out Professional Help
If you want to start using big data for your small business, working with IT professionals is crucial. They will be able to help collect and analyze this data. Trying to do this complicated work on your own can lead to lots of mistakes being made.
Not only can IT professionals help you analyze data, they can also advise you on how to keep it safe. Before hiring a company to help with this work, be sure to find out about the previous experience they have.
