Post written by
Terence Mills
Terence Mills, CEO of AI.io, is an AI pioneer, thought leader, and digital technology specialist.
Consumers are inundated every day with ads for products and services. The number of options is exhausting. What makes consumers stop and pay attention?
As brands work to answer this question, they become more creative as a result. In fact, many are diving into the benefits of big data analytics. For instance, in 2016 Starbucks started using AI to send personalized offerings to its customers via email. Beyond customizing drinks to match personal tastes, the company uses its loyalty card and app to collect and analyze customer data, including where and when purchases are made.
Big data isn’t a new term. It’s a concept that has been around for many years — but the first big data analysts used spreadsheets that were typed by hand and then manually analyzed. You can imagine how long that process used to take.
Innovations in technology have changed the rules when it comes to big data. Advanced software systems greatly reduce analytics time, giving companies the ability to make speedy decisions that help increase revenue, reduce costs and stimulate growth. This offers a competitive advantage to the brands that are able to work faster and target their consumers more effectively.
If you’re a brand considering investing in big data analytics, here are some of the ways you may benefit:
1. Customer Acquisition And Retention
To stand out, organizations must have a unique approach to market their products. By using big data, companies can pinpoint exactly what customers are looking for. They establish a solid customer base right out of the gate.
New big data processes observe the patterns of consumers. They then use those patterns to trigger brand loyalty by collecting more data to identify more trends and ways to make customers happy. Amazon has mastered this technique by providing one of the most personalized shopping experiences on the internet today. Suggestions are based not only on past purchases, but also on items that other customers have bought, browsing behavior and many other factors.
2. Focused And Targeted Campaigns
Businesses can use big data to deliver tailored products to their targeted market. Forget spending money on advertising campaigns that don’t work. Big data helps companies make a sophisticated analysis of customer trends. This analysis usually includes monitoring online purchases and observing point-of-sale transactions.
These insights then allow companies to create successful, focused and targeted campaigns, thus allowing companies to match and exceed customer expectations and build greater brand loyalty.
3. Identification Of Potential Risks
These days businesses are thriving in high-risk environments, but these environments require risk management processes — and big data has been instrumental in developing new risk management solutions. Big data can improve the effectiveness of risk management models and create smarter strategies.
4. Innovative Products
Big data continues to help companies update existing products while innovating new ones. By collecting large amounts of data, companies are able to distinguish what fits their customer base.
If a company wants to remain competitive in today’s market, it can no longer rely on instinct. With so much data to work off of, organizations can now implement processes to track their customer feedback, product success and what their competitors are doing.
5. Complex Supplier Networks
By using big data, companies offer supplier networks, otherwise known as B2B communities, with greater precision and insights. Suppliers are able to escape constraints they typically face by applying big data analytics. Through the application of big data, suppliers use higher levels of contextual intelligence, which is necessary for their success.
Supply chain executives are now looking at data analytics as a disruptive technology by changing the foundation of supplier networks to include high-level collaboration. This collaboration lets networks apply new knowledge to existing problems or other scenarios.
How To Begin Putting Big Data To Work
If you are a business that has data, but you do not know where to begin or how to use it, don’t worry. You are not alone.
First, you must determine what business problem you will be trying to solve with the data that you have. For instance, are you trying to determine the level of shopping cart abandonment and why?
Second, just because you have the data doesn’t automatically mean that you can put it to use to solve your problem. Most organizations have been collecting data for a decade or more. Yet, it is unstructured and messy — what is known as “dirty data.” You will need to clean it up by putting it into a structured format before you can put it to use.
Third, if you decide to work with a firm, you will need one that can do more than just visualize the data. It will need to be a firm that can model the data to drive insights that will help you solve your business problem. Modeling data is not easy or inexpensive, so it’s important to have a budget and plan in place before taking this step.
An Important Investment
The biggest businesses are continuing to grow, thanks to big data analytics. Developing technology is becoming available to more organizations than ever before. Once brands have data at their disposal, they can implement the appropriate analysis systems to solve many of their problems.
Editorial StandardsCorrectionsReprints & Permissions
Many companies around us came to create before us, and now they are trendy in the world. Many companies are still in the developing phase. But there is a problem for the company or the business.
That problem is anybody can take your business idea and make a company with updated products. In this way, people will start to shift to his creations.
It does not matter how much your business or the company is performing well today, and the thing matter is how the company will rise and beat the competition in the future, just like Yahoo and Google.
You can also see examples of AI writing tools. One company released this service, and the other took the idea from it and then they also made their system which can provide better results.
It will impact the company because competition is increasing, and maybe in the future, one AI writing tool can become more popular.
For remaining on the top, constantly finding and providing new things, a company needs a lot of data. This data can be in any form, and it can be about the users, products, or other companies.
Companies should have their own data analytics platform to get the information in very little time.
Otherwise, they will hire a person to gather data, process it, and then report to the company. If the company has its platform, they will continuously get data and improve their product with time; otherwise, they can only get limited data that cannot grow their business in the long run.
So, it is essential to make fast decisions specific strategies, understand things more efficiently, and discuss things with others on the launch of new products and services.
Let’s discuss it in detail.
Why is it Important For Companies to Invest in Building A Complete Data and Analytics Platform?
Imagine running a clothing brand, and your products are unique compared to other products present in the market.
You will make an outstanding amount of sales a few times, and the company will make the name in the country or world.
But when people say that the things you represent to the world are working, they start to think about how to present more attractive things in front of the world.
Hopefully, the person will find a new idea by discussing it. When he makes the company and starts to sell the products, you have to take care of it. Now you need your own data analytics platform of the company.
When there is no competition in the market, a specific platform for processing and gathering data is not required. Many tasks can be done by hiring a person for a bit of time or contacting the company giving data analysis services.
But competition in the market means you have to take each step with complete care. Own platform of the company will help you in it.
Let’s take another example; imagine you are the store owner, which sells different things like candies, chips, and many other things. Many people are coming to you because of the store’s beautiful interior or exterior design.
They also came to you because of quality things and reasonable price, but one store opens near you, and two stores open in the area after more months. In this way number of stores will start to increase.
It will not affect your business immediately because you have built trust with people. But the other point is if you do not focus on the business rivals, it will be bad for you.
For this, you need a setup and hire the people who will study different things and present the graph in front of you.
The data analyst team will tell you that people purchase specific things more in other stores than our store and which items they are buying more in your store. Now the data is in front of you.
You will decrease the prices or give discounts and bounces on what people will purchase in other stores to come back to you and improve the items that people are buying more.
It can be in packaging or introducing different flavors of the specific thing.
The number of your customer will increase every day because of these techniques. Who can only do it by having a platform of data analytics?
You will always get the report of any error immediately and how the error is affecting your customers. The company will always stay on the top by having its data analysis platform.
You can also analyze the risks that may occur in the coming days. There is not one source of collecting data, and there are multiple sources for it.
Some give exact information, and some are passed from different tests to get the precise information that the company is looking for.
Will Investment in the Data Analyst Platform Always Give Good Results?
Yes, it always gives good results but only for big businesses or companies. If you are managing a small business, analyze the things yourself or give money to the data analyst for the specific task only.
In small companies, you do not earn that level of revenue to manage the cost of a complete setup.
All the profit will be invested in the setup, and you will get nothing. First, try to build the business to the level where you do not have any problem making a complete office where data analysts will sit and work for you.
You can do different small tasks with data by yourself also. You have software like Word, Excel, and many others to make the reports and analyze the performance at the primary level.
You can also manage the record of the week, month, or year with its help.
What does Data Warehousing Allow Organizations to Achieve?
While making decisions, you can see that companies take many surveys (online and offline). When they get stuck on the point, they go to the user and review the product.
It simply means that when the owner sees the problem, he has to stop and know what others are thinking.
For example, if a company spends six months creating the product. Then taking people’s views on it, the owner has to spend more than four or five months.
No upgrading will happen in these four or five months because nobody knows what people are thinking about already present products.
After getting complete information, the following action is taken. But having its warehouses will help the company to track the data in very little time.
The people will start to work immediately after the product’s launch, and it will not take four or five months to upgrade things.
I hope you can understand things. If you have any questions about it, you can comment below.