As business becomes increasingly competitive, it is the goal of business executives to continuously identify new trends, services and products to grow their companies.
One topic that is gaining popularity and now being marketed is the emergence of offering data analytics to help run your organization.
This valuable information provides business owners with metrics for more informed decision-making to run their businesses, and develop better understanding of their customers. They also gain opportunities to develop a variety concrete facts to run the business, instead of relying on gut feelings.
Do you run your business on fact, fiction or a combination of both? And wouldn’t it be great to really know the truth with objective information to help better achieve your business goals?
Equal opportunity
Big Data is not only for big companies — it’s for all organizations of all sizes. This secure, scalable and predictive data provides a management tool of enormous value to our treasured merchant base.
Whether you are the local neighborhood retailer or a large Fortune 500 company, using data to better manage your business is critical. Entrepreneurs are looking for analytics, but more importantly, they want to know how to use and intepret these numbers to provide actionable results.
Data helps business executives identify problems, recognize patterns and gain meaningful insights to answer key questions like what ultimately drives sales, which deals are likely to close and how to make employees happy and more.
This new big data world is not only about identifying problems faster, but about solving problems that were not solvable before. When you put the right analytics to work on your big data problems, you can stop thinking of big data as only a challenge and start seeing big data as an opportunity.
If you’re the owner of a small business, your ability to succeed in the face of larger competitors has likely been driven by your personal intuition and ability to provide a superior service. But big data is changing the business landscape.
Changing market
What if, as a small retailer, you could analyze the relationship between social-media conversations and buying trends to quickly capitalize on emerging sales opportunities? How about understanding, as an example, how your merchant’s pizza shop was doing relative to other pizza shops in your five-mile radius vs. other pizza parlors nationally?
Data can include category spend within a region, competitive performance comparisons, trends over specific month, seasonality trends, spending profiles, target audiences, gross margin of your bestselling products or knowing which days of the week are most profitable.
Some believe that big data analytics projects are too costly and complex for a small business to take on. Some of the legacy analytics solutions on the market were initially built for larger enterprises but this is all changing. The SMB market, our marketplace, is ready for data analytics.
The world of big data is here and ready for the smaller merchant who traditionally hasn’t been exposed to this service. Introduce data analytics and your company’s growth, your decision-making, client satisfaction and overall business performance should increase with the more sophisticated analytics.