How to Make the Most of Big Data Analytics in Your Business

Data has easily become one of the biggest commodities; when used correctly, it can help to scale a business and develop long-term relationships with customers. In fact, a recent report shows that 94 percent of organizations state that data and analytics are vital to their growth and digital transformation efforts.

When it comes to big data, it’s no longer a niche term that business owners are unaware of. Data-driven companies from major industries are implementing big data analytics to enhance the customer experience and streamline business processes such as supply chain management.

In this article, you’re going to learn how to get the most out of big data analytics to help put you in the driving seat of your company growth.

But first, let’s get clear on big data.

What Is Big Data?

Big data is the term used when referring to large data sets that are collected from various sources. It can be either structured or unstructured data, structured data referring to data that is in a fixed field or record, and unstructured is data that’s not arranged in a pre-set data model or schema.

Due to the large size of the data sets, it wouldn’t be possible to process them manually and would also be incredibly time-consuming with data growing at such an exponential rate. It’s estimated that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created on the internet every day. Due to the speed at which it’s growing, it’s essential to have data-driven tools to assist with processing big data.

What Are Big Data Analytics?

Big data analytics is the process of examining big data and deducing information such as correlations, customer preferences, and market trends that help to make more informed business decisions.

The tools and technologies available to provide big data analytics can help to gather new information and insights about consumers and even the company itself. Currently, the tools and techniques used to analyze big data are machine learning, data mining, predictive analytics, text analytics, and more.

Impact of Big Data on the Business Landscape

With essential data at your fingertips, you’re able to make more lucrative business decisions that benefit multiple areas of your business. Not only can big data analytics tell you more about your company’s operations and its customers, but it also helps to increase your bottom line. How to use big data analytics and the benefits:

• Gaining and retaining customers: a report shows that data-driven companies that utilize customer insight data are 23 times more likely to gain new customers and six times more likely to retain customers.
• Focused Marketing and personalized engagement: the benefits of making data-driven decisions can be seen in multiple areas of a company. For example, big data can pave the way for delivering marketing messages that evoke emotion and connect directly with your customer. Learning more about your customer’s preferences can help you develop effective marketing campaigns that focus on personalized engagement.
• Understanding customer needs: big data analytics help you understand your customer’s needs, leading to innovative product development and a richer customer experience.
• Supply chain management: use internal and external data sources to make real-time inventory and supply chain management decisions. Big data analytics be helpful for retailers when forecasting supply and demand, alongside inventory levels and logistics capacity. Another key use for big data analytics is to drive strategic decisions when sourcing from suppliers by having more data on current trends and supply shortages.  
• Risk management: big data analytics can use data patterns to identify risks to ensure that efficient risk management strategies are in place.

Work with a Data Scientist

To get the most out of your data, it’s essential to work with a professional who can utilize big data analytics tools. To improve your customer acquisition, marketing efforts, and company revenue — hire a dedicated data scientist today.

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