How is Big Data Analytics Reshaping the Industrial Growth?
In today’s fiercely competitive business environment, every organization has to implement unique strategies to stay ahead in the race. One of the ways of doing so is to predict customer needs and spending patterns and chalk out suitable marketing strategies. If the right data is effectively extracted and analyzed, it can help businesses meet various targets and objectives. This is where big data plays a very important role.
Before diving into the importance of big data analysis and how it can help improve your business, it will be relevant to define big data first.
What is Big Data?
Big data in its most rudimentary form can be defined as a combination of tools and processes that can manage huge volumes of data. The data is generated when people interact either with each other or with various businesses. By analyzing this data with highly advanced analytics, it is possible to predict customer preferences and who the most valuable of them are.
Armed with these reports, companies can structure their product lines or make modifications in marketing strategies to target this core group. This is why almost all major sectors and industries have hitched their bandwagon to big data and are now reaping innumerable benefits from it.
A few examples will better illustrate this point.
One of the ways to extract data from customer usage is to have sensors embedded in various products, ranging from children’s toys to industrial goods. These sensors send data to manufacturers on how the products are used in real life. With such knowledge to fall back on, companies can design future products or create new services to precisely match customer needs, thereby increasing sales and conversions.
Another way that big data can help businesses in their data management is through profiling customers that really matter. Usually, people today search the Internet or browse through social media channels before arriving at a purchase decision. Big data helps an organization to profile these customers and engage with them on a one-to-one platform on a real-time basis. By pandering to specific needs of customers known from big data analytics, any business can gain an advantage over competitors.
Importance of Big Data Analytics
The primary advantage of big data analytics is that it quickly examines large volumes of data and establishes an internal correlation between them. Thus, it is possible to extract patterns that in the normal course without big data would be extremely difficult to know or get answers immediately. Even though the concept of big data has been around for quite some time, sophisticated tools were not there to apply analytics and get the desired results swiftly. Businesses in the olden days were analyzing data through cumbersome and tedious spreadsheet methodologies.
Big data analytics facilitates businesses to harness data and use interpretations to their benefit. Thus modifications can be made to existing operational systems or products to increase productivity and profitability. These are some of the areas where big data analytics have a direct and positive impact on organizations.
- Quick and optimized decision making – Big data analytics provide businesses with the quick analysis of new sources of data. Based on the findings, it is possible to arrive at decisions in every sphere of operations, leading to swift growth and development and increased sales and conversions.
- Reduction in costs – Specific big data technologies such as cloud-based analytics are able to store large amounts of data at very reasonable and affordable costs. This results in significant savings and opens up opportunities for more efficient ways of doing business.
- Introduction of new products and services – By analyzing and gauging customer preferences, it is possible for businesses to create strategies that give customers exactly what they want, leading to high satisfaction levels. Instead of creating products and selling to customers, companies are now structuring products as per market needs.
Various ways how big data can improve your business
In the current business scenario businesses are creating products and services based on precise market needs and big data plays a major role in it. Here are some ways big data can improve your business and bottom line.
- Knowing the ideal customer – Sales strategies in the past depended on previous sales performance or customer demographics. With big data analytics, it is possible to gain valuable insights into present or potential customers through such details as websites visited and social media sites most frequented.
- Optimizing marketing strategies – Big data analytics help to optimize marketing strategies and enable companies to make smarter decisions. This is more so in the present scenario where customers make purchases over multiple online channels. Further substantial savings in costs can be made by allocating marketing budgets for shorter and higher ROI on marketing spend.
- Greater Customer interaction – With big data analytics it is possible to get crucial information about customer behavior. This includes their demographics, frequency of buying, and shopping inclinations. Based on this analytics, product improvements can be made. Again, through Artificial Intelligence or machine learning algorithms, the real-time interaction may be initiated by offering specific products and promotions in line with customer interests.
- Monitoring brand reputation – Companies can now easily monitor the status and standing of their brand on social media platforms and multiple websites. Reviews and testimonials can be perused and an idea formed of brand reputation. On the other hand, through big data analytics, a strong brand presence can be created on these channels after knowing customer opinion.
- Competitor analysis – Through the same tools that enable collection of your big data, it is also possible to capture competitors’ data too. Hence, new strategies can be evolved based on this data to gain an edge over others.
- Market research – Huge volumes of data are now at the disposal of companies and these can be processed swiftly through big data analytics for market research and analysis at a much-reduced cost than before.
This is how big data analytics has become an optimized vehicle for reshaping industrial growth in the current business scenario.
