Is it important to leverage Big Data for small business?

Small business owner may think that big data is for large companies with big time technology budgets. In reality, it is not. Small business can also stand for big data benefits within available – small budget. A small business needs to look at big data in different perspective as they may not know how to start and where to start or may not know if big data exist in the company.

Big data and analytics has become indispensable for any business to stay ahead in this competitive world. If we look at any small or large enterprise having outstanding financial performance over a period of last 4 to 5 years, all will have one thing in common – all of them leverage big data for their decision support.

What does this mean to a small business? Yes, it is the time to start with a first step – if not started.

Today, most of the small companies know that big data is playing a vital role in success of small company. Knowingly or unknowingly many small size business are missing out the benefits of big data because of some wrong believes. Recent studies states that small business thinks that utilizing big data is too costly. Quite often, it’s not really so. You don’t always need to invest huge money in storage, hardware or not even on resources. You may choose cloud option for storage and outsource it to a right vendor for processing.

Let’s look at some ways a small business can leverage big data

Increased customer focus – Small companies can look at all possible data sources – internal and external data, which can help generating better customer insight. Focus on customer preferences can bring increased customer base, lead conversion and revenue. Big data can help finding these hidden insight which can eventually lead to increased lead conversion.

Generate innovative ideas & New product development – Recent trends shows that companies do not require decades to build a billion dollar business. It all can happen in few years leveraging big data. Big data and analytics play a vital role in this journey of quick growth and increased ROI. A small business need innovative ideas which can bring them out from the common line. With the help of big data and analytics, business can have different and accurate information to make innovative ideas and products. It can help small companies to gain competitive edge in marketplace.

As long as you are not investing on big data hardware and software, it is all about testing the water and check whether you can make better informed decisions and leverage them to stand out in the competitive market place.

Massive data-sets on everything from demographic to social data, weather to GPS data,  consumer spending habits to government budgets – many are freely available online – if you know where to look and how to pull it. Also, there are many free big data tools available to make sense of this data.