Every decision that we make online creates new data. Every click on a webpage, scrolling, and pausing at specific texts and the type of keywords we search are actions that create truckloads of data. Digitalization has significantly reduced the dependence on guesswork. Decision-makers now rely more on raw, factual user data in the pursuit of understanding consumer behavior.
While leading companies such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook already use Big Data, small businesses can quickly jump on the bandwagon without investing vast sums of money to make sense of raw data. Here are some innovative ways for small companies to gather lots of information and use it to their benefit.
-
Primary Data from Customer Surveys
Customers are the primary sources of revenue for every business. To create a sustained system of revenue, customer satisfaction should be every business’s top priority. Understanding the psyche, traits, attributes, and demographics of customers is key to providing satisfactory services.
Therefore, small businesses should gather personal, attitudinal, behavioral, data, and feedback on products and services from their customers. They can do this by conducting online and offline surveys and focus groups. The gathered data can then be used to create more personalized marketing campaigns to expand the business while simultaneously increasing customer satisfaction levels. The best is to manage and store this information in a database or any other alternatives to Microsoft Access. That way, multiple users can use them at the same time without corrupting the data.
-
Online Transactional Data for Better Analytics
Businesses can capitalize on the most convenient and readily available data through their point-of-sale software. The databases that track all the orders, online or in-store, can be collected for further analysis. POS data provides contextual data to businesses while keeping track of multiple variables that affect customers’ purchase decisions. For example, POS databases can reveal what consumers like to purchase more often, the number of goods they are buying, the time and date, discounts, etc.
This technique is beneficial for business people running and owning e-commerce websites. If young entrepreneurs wish to take advantage of data analytics, it would be best to enroll in an online masters in analytics to learn how to make sense of unorganized data. This will significantly enhance their skill to organize raw data and use it in business decision-making. Plus, the added qualification can also help people who want to progress in a data-related career path.
-
Website Traffic Monitoring and Cookies Data
Cookies are small packets of data generated by web browsers and websites. They store individual user data and collect personal data in settings, login, and browser history. An excellent example of utilizing cookie data are the carts on an e-commerce website that users fill up before purchasing.
Cookie data can assist businesses in understanding the nature and choices of consumers before they make a purchase. It also reveals the temporary basket of goods a user selects before going through with the payment.
Google Analytics similarly shows website data and monitors the inflow and outflow of traffic on a website. Business owners and entrepreneurs can use such tools to monitor content/products that generate higher traffic on their websites. This can be paired with cookie data to understand website visitors’ behavior and create more personalized content and products that improved customer satisfaction and ROI.
-
Social Media Marketing Analytics
Social Media has out-performed all conventional forms of media and continues to expand at an exponential scale. Businesses of all sizes have responded by growing and maintaining their social media presence to keep their customers engaged.
Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc., have enabled companies to expand their brand presence and generate ever-increasing revenues. Social media marketing campaigns are more personalized. They give brands higher control over the type of content they wish to utilize to reach people and more options to target the right audience. Moreover, analytics from social media websites also reveals crucial information about the weaknesses and shortcomings of content, products, and marketing campaigns in general. Savvy marketers can use this data to fine-tune their advertising efforts to generate more business via social media.
-
Third-Party Data Purchases
Businesses with ample resources to invest in big data services can reach out to other companies that sell audience data. This audience data includes verified user profiles of millions of people. Their data is collected and sorted based on their interests, the types of products they purchase, their browsing habits, and their behavior on the internet.
Sorting through vast volumes of user data provided by third-party data collection companies can be cumbersome. However, it can enable small businesses to run highly personalized campaigns tailored to individual customer needs and preferences. Instead of using email blasts and conventional marketing methods that may feel like firing arrows in the dark, targeted campaigns are more effective and have higher conversation rates. Marketing budgets can be more efficiently employed, while analytics can help determine the number of engaged users and the conversion rate.
Conclusion
AI algorithms and machine-learning continue to make more considerable strides in the technology industry with every passing day. Relying on factual data to identify consumer trends, rationale, choices, and decisions are essential to staying relevant and afloat in the current competitive environment. Small businesses should also take advantage of this rise in data-driven decision-making as it has proven itself in terms of reliability, validity, and cost-effectiveness. The chances of human error and guesswork have significantly reduced as machines can now more efficiently collect, analyze, and convert meaningless data into valuable insights.
