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Small and medium businesses are becoming more data driven in the conduct of their internet marketing campaigns. The advent of the big data has revolutionized the way business firms and marketing professionals conduct their strategies with digital marketing. The process of data management in every company has eliminated the decision making based on gut, intuition and dependence on the past experiences about their marketing schemes. With the combination of analytics and big data technology, small and medium enterprises are able to use accurate information taken from actionable data points that allow them to undertake a smarter marketing campaign through wiser business decision process.
The chain of big data development
Big data involves a diverse set of information that can be massive in numbers and fast changing. The internet technology conceived the process of digital marketing as more consumers are getting engaged in using the mobile technology and the internet when looking for products and services. The big data explosion was so sudden and it does not involve only a single measurable entity. The big data trend consists of volume, variety and velocity that can be too great for marketers to measure on their own. The innovative impact of big data on business enterprises is too great as more digital marketers begin to explore and discover the measurable data points that can be retrieved using analytics in improving a business marketing scheme.
The combination of technology and big data delivers a more efficient and productive means of exploiting business marketing strategies that can help understand customer behaviors and preferences. Using analytics tools, big data management becomes more viable to use with the ability to extract massive information of different varieties that can be used in improving customer engagement, product development, and enhance the search engine optimization process to increase the search ranking of businesses in the digital marketing world.
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How big data improve small business enterprises
The use of big data and analytics brought a major impact on small businesses, helping their enterprise become more competitive with larger firms. As observed by major companies and big data analytics, there following are the advantageous benefits of big data that has helped small businesses grow their customer reach and marketing productivity:
- Growth in the number of loyal customers
The big data and analytics technology helped small businesses to improve its competence in processing information more rapidly in real time, enabling them to respond more accurately to the changing demands of their customers. Big data helped many enterprises to become highly responsive in improving their business services and product development owing to their ability of consolidating customer data more quickly. Consequently, customers are able to experience improvement in the services they need which help increase the loyalty rate of the consumers to small businesses.
- Big data provide a cost effective solution for using expensive hardware
Small businesses usually struggle in coping with the cost of acquisition and maintenance of using expensive hardware systems to help manage the massive data influx for their business. Big data offers a more viable solution that eliminates the use of commodity hardware and the other costs incurred for licensing the same and obtaining proprietary database costs. The big data analytics solution is available in less expensive tools that are often open source, thereby offering a cost effective means of data management and analytics systems.
- Using data applications to grow the database
Companies can now use modern applications that can help collect relevant and useful data for their marketing plans. Most the applications that can help gather customer information have the ability to extract data metrics on various sources. It is easy for data apps collect geospatial data, for instance, or you can also build a data app to monitor valuable social media marketing metrics. There are wide resources available for businesses to use in developing the apps that they need to improve targeted areas of their marketing campaigns.
- Small businesses acquire competitive advantage
One of the rewarding benefits of big data technology is that it helps small businesses to become at par with bigger firms in terms of their ability of acquiring and growing their own big databases that help them restructure their organization for more competitive advantage. They can respond more quickly to the rapid change in their market demands and able to engage their customers better by providing more enhanced services in real time.
Small business response to big data and analytics
Because of the advantageous features of big data to businesses, about 75% of enterprises have either adopted big data analytics or about to launch their own big data projects to optimize their marketing performance. Most companies are becoming more data driven and it is expected that the majority of companies will be using data analytics to mainstream the operation of their business departments. The main areas of business operation that organizations aim to improve using a data analytics process are the following:
- Improve business initiative in responding to customer demands and needs.
- Enhance business intelligence and decision making process.
- Facilitate a speedy analysis and make a data driven marketing decisions.
- Develop new products that meet the changing needs of the customers and the target markets.
- To drive revenue driven marketing schemes.
Small business considerations on big data technologies
Small businesses need to understand that the rapid growth of big data in the digital marketing industry results in the development of various big data technologies and sources. Finding the one that will most benefit your marketing campaigns and programs can become a tough decision to make.
- Consider whether you need to use a proprietary, open source or cloud based services in data management. Proprietary software is more expensive while an open source can give you more room to explore the free community versions of developers that will work best for your business. A cloud service on one hand can provide you a cloud based environment that can facilitate collaborative work of your team.
- Implement an agile big data implementation in your business where team members are focused on what they can do with the data to optimize their marketing intelligence.
- Hire professional developers and marketing analytics, which have the skills in interpreting data and using them as viable marketing solutions for your business.