Big Data Collection for Small Businesses

Big data has been one of major the business buzzwords for the past couple of years. The term refers to large volumes of information that are too big for traditional data management and storage.

What’s in Big Data?

Don’t think of big data as a mysterious clump of IT code. Instead, picture it as all kinds of information about your inventory, customers, industry, market trends, and much more. But not just a little information. It’s called big data for a reason.

Big data can tell you every single tiny detail about your business you never even dreamed of uncovering. For example, let’s look at your website. Big data lets you know where your visitors come from, their exact journey through your site (like, their mouse spent 4.5 seconds hovering above the “About Us” section), what links they clicked on, and so on.

Just to think about that sheer amount of data can be overwhelming. Let alone process it. Luckily, you don’t have to work your way through all that information manually. Analytics will do it for you.

Big data analytics can help businesses get to know their customers on a much deeper level, better target their marketing campaigns, predict future demand, see patterns and trends among customers and industry-wide, and much more.

With big data, you can get to know your business and your customers inside out.

That sounds great. But where does big data come from? And even more importantly, how can small businesses collect it?

Sources of Big Data

If you think you’ll need to lurk in dark alleys to collect information or hire James Bond to do it for you, you’re wrong. In fact, you most likely already have all the sources for big data collection.

Transactions

Your customer transactions are the biggest and most useful source of data. Just from one transaction, you can learn what a customer bought, how they paid for it, when they bought it, and whether they used any coupons or special offers for their purchase.

Collecting and analyzing data from transactions allows you to gain crucial insight into general shopping trends, your best selling products, which promotions work and which don’t, what payment methods are the most popular, and much more.

Bear in mind that when storing financial information, you need to adhere to various legal requirements about data protection and security. If you don’t have the means necessary to do so, don’t attempt to store financial data. But even without that, information from customer transactions will prove invaluable for your business.

Website Analytics

Customers interacting with your website leave you with tons of useful data. You need to capture and assess information from every customer interaction. Tools like Google Analytics can tell you which parts of your website are the most popular, which links customers click on, how did they land on your site in the first place, and so on.

This data is really important for your online marketing effort. You can learn what works and what doesn’t, and what customers are really looking for. Funnily enough, they may not even be aware of it themselves. With website analytics tools, you can learn more about customer behavior than through questionnaires or surveys.

It’s just as important to analyze your social media interactions with customers. All major platforms have built-in analytics tools that give you insight into your followers’ behavior and how they interact with your business. All this knowledge provides you with powerful options when it comes to better targeting your marketing campaigns.

Brick-and-Mortar Store Traffic

Believe it or not, your customers’ movements around your brick-and-mortar store are just as important as their online steps. What items customers visit, what time they come to your store, which aisles they stop at, how much time they stand around deliberating before making a purchase are all helpful when it comes to placing products and furniture in your physical store.

This info also comes in handy when you decide about your staffing needs. If your full-time employees can handle most of the work but regularly feel overwhelmed at certain times when the influx of customers triples, you can hire part timers to help out during those shifts.

If you have security cameras, you can use that footage to discover the patterns of customer movements. It also helps with staff placement: which are the areas most frequented by customers who need assistance with their shopping?

Tools for Big Data Storage and Analytics

Various companies offer software to collect, store, and analyze big data. Platforms like Google BigQuery, Oracle Bigdata Analytics, Amazon Web Service, or Arcadia Data help businesses store and analyze their big data to help make better decisions.

Look around the market and choose a platform that best suits your business’ needs. Remember, even the smallest business can profit from the tremendous insight and power big data provides.