How SMBs Can Unlock the Full Potential of Big Data

According to a recent study, 53% of all companies now incorporate big data in business operations. But many SMBs still think that big data is off limits for them. In a global market that pits everyone else against enterprise companies, SMBs are losing a competitive advantage by allowing large businesses to gain the upper hand with big data.

Enterprise companies have been investing in big data infrastructure for decades. However, recent technological advancements are enabling SMBs to close this gap and harness big data to compete for customers. Read on to learn how.

The Data Landscape: How the Gap Between SMBs and Enterprises Emerged

Over the past twenty-five years, enterprise companies have been eating into the market share of SMBs by dominating two interrelated trends: web commerce and big data. With the emergence of intuitive web dev technologies, online POS platforms, and third-party marketplaces, SMBs can now legitimately compete with enterprises in terms of web commerce.

But when it comes to big data, SMBs are still behind. And this matters for the bottom line. Companies that leverage big data analytics experience a 15% increase in sales compared to companies that do not.

The deficit traces back several decades. In the 80s and 90s, many enterprise companies invested substantially in data infrastructure and data personnel. Enterprises companies purchased on-premise data warehouses to collate all their data sources, and employed specialized engineers to maintain this hardware.

In recent years, with the emergence of big data and algorithmic user experiences, this investment in data infrastructure has paid off. Enterprise companies reimagined the buyer’s journey with an unprecedented level of data-driven granularity, targeting customers more effectively than ever before. Meanwhile, most SMBs still don’t even know what a data warehouse is.

This gap in big data capabilities endures to this day. And it seemed as if it would stay that way. But in recent years, new technologies have democratized big data. Now, SMBs can utilize big data, too. Here’s an overview of these new technologies, and the insights they can yield for SMBs.

Three Technologies that Unlock Big Data for SMBs

Three particular technologies — cloud data management platforms, cloud data warehouses, and business intelligence (BI) platforms — make big data accessible to SMBs. When used in tandem, these technologies enable SMBs to generate sophisticated insights that were once only available to enterprise companies.

1. Cloud Data Management Platform

In the era of big data, even SMBs must manage a vast number of data sources. To generate meaningful insights, SMBs must develop ways to extract, orchestrate, and clean data from all these varied sources.

For decades, enterprise companies spent heavily to build out this kind of data infrastructure. They employed full data teams to construct technical systems, produce data connectors, and manage data processes. SMBs had neither the time or resources for such projects.

But with cloud data management platforms, SMBs can now manage all of their data in a single platform, minus the prohibitive cost and the technical complexity. With pre-built data connectors, data process automation, and other key features, a data management platform allows SMBs to collate and format all their data without requiring large financial investments or data engineering skills.

2. Cloud Data Warehouse

Data warehouses enable businesses to store, centralize, and analyze all of a company’s data. Since the 1980s, many enterprises have invested in expensive on-premise data warehouses that are unaffordable for SMBs. Besides the high up-front costs, on-premise data warehouses also require maintenance and technical expertise that most SMBs cannot provide.

In recent years, solutions such as Snowflake and BigQuery brought data warehouses into the cloud. Cloud data warehouses are serverless, distributed platforms that do not require SMBs to invest in costly on-premise hardware. These platforms also offer features such as auto-scalability and no-code interfaces that allow SMBs to develop a single source of data truth without all the maintenance burdens.

3. Business Intelligence Platform

Business intelligence, analytics, and reporting are major weak points for most SMBs. Over the years, enterprise companies built out dedicated BI teams to produce these specialized business insights. This is often the end goal of big data workflows, and historically, SMBs were locked out due to a lack of resources.

However, the rise of BI platforms have enabled SMBs that lack specialized personnel to produce custom insights, reports, and visualizations. With a BI platform, SMBs can finally access the kinds of data and analytics that only enterprise companies have had access to. This allows SMBs to compete more evenly with enterprises.

5 Ways SMBs Can Implement Big Data

Once an SMB unlocks big data with the right technology, there’s almost no limit to what they can do with the data. Today, SMBs are using big data in a number of ways, but here are some standout use cases:

• Enhancing business operations — Combine ERP data with other sources, such as HR data and sales data, to track business operations. Measure the efficiency of customer interactions, workers per shift, hours of operation, and other key indicators by using hybrid data patterns.
• Leveraging sales trends — Match in-store data, online data, and buyer intent signals to anticipate and meet customer demand. Understand seasonal, temporal, and geographic sales variances and isolate abnormal buying patterns. Take advantage of trends as they happen in real-time.
• Building comprehensive customer profiles — Aggregate every data source related to a customer, from CRM platforms, to website activity, to third-party sources, and form a comprehensive customer profile. Improve ad serves, personalization, and conversion rates.
• Optimizing pricing — Splice together sales volume data across channels, inventory differentials, and other markers to develop supply and demand funnels. Then develop optimized pricing schemes.
• Improving customer interactions — Tie customer satisfaction to dates, times, stores, employees, and other indicators to make customer interactions better, more efficient, and more impactful.

These use cases are a good start. But they’re only scratching the surface of what SMBs can do with big data.

How to Find the Right Big Data Technology for Your SMB

For SMBs, diving straight into the world of big data can be overwhelming. This sense of not knowing where to start is a big reason why SMBs avoid implementing big data altogether. Thankfully, in the past few years, a number of online resources have appeared that help SMBs choose the right big data technologies.

The best resources are always the unvarnished opinions of other SMBs. The sites below empower SMBs to read objective reviews and commentaries from other SMBs about leading big data technologies on the market today. This allows SMBs to cut through the clutter of marketing content and find out what really works for companies of a similar size.

• TrustRadius — TrustRadius is a technology review forum with highly active sections for data integration, cloud data warehouses, and business intelligence platforms. The site enables SMBs to sort independently confirmed reviews by company size and background.
• G2 — With over 1 million confirmed reviews from real end-users, G2 offers SMBs a robust view into all big data technologies on the market today. Harness comparison matrices to assess competing services side-by-side and read reviews from verified SMBs users.
• Capterra — Capterra’s in-depth examinations of features and pricing give SMBs a more granular look at each big data technology, without drowning them in obscure jargon. This is a great resource to augment searches from the other sites with more detail.
• SoftwareReviews — Software Reviews melds sentiment towards the client-vendor relationship and product effectiveness into a novel Emotional Footprint score. Users can filter Emotional Footprint scores based on company size to understand the holistic benefits big data solutions have on SMBs.

Of course, these are just a few of the resources SMBs can tap to find the right big data technologies. But they offer a firm foundation for SMBs as they seek to incorporate big data.

Now is the Time for SMBs to Seize Big Data

Until recently, SMBs did not have the resources to realize the full potential of big data. But today, new technologies have eliminated the pricing and technical barriers that once barred SMBs from maximizing all of their data sources. Enterprise companies have been using big data within their business process for years. But now, SMBs can harness big data like the big players.