24
February 2020
The term ‘Big Data’ is used regularly in modern society, but making sense of this mountainous information as a business is becoming increasingly challenging.
This is a shame, because data is a fortune waiting to be discovered. Within the information your business collects minute-by-minute, there lies crucial insight into customer behaviour, competitor activity and the way in which your market it evolving.
Thankfully, there are plenty of tools you can use to make sense of big data, and by employing analytics solutions, you can use it to stay ahead of the competition.
In this blog post, we consider how big data analytics enhance your competitiveness.
It makes you more productive
With big data analytics, your business can supercharge its productivity levels.
You now have vital information to hand that will give you an insight into customer demand and their behavioural patterns. This window into unstructured and structured data provides a significant boost in productivity, because it enables organisations to improve the processes they undertake each day.
Big data can also be used to analyse the performance of employees. You can now see far more easily what is and isn’t working and which areas of the business are suffering from lower levels of productivity.
Like anything in business, once you know where the problem lies, you can seek to address it.
It offers a new window into your marketing
One of the biggest benefits of data analytics is the ability to look deeply into your marketing campaigns to assess what is and isn’t producing the desired results.
Marketing teams can now view statistics and engagement metrics that demonstrate the type of content that has been most effective at encouraging customers to continue along the buying journey.
The ability to see how popular your brand is through big data collected via social networking and website analytics is also a huge boon for businesses of all sizes, and it’s now far easier to spot when there appears to be an issue with your brand identity or its reputation within the marketplace.
It reduces business costs and risk
You can save significant operating costs by investing in big data analytics.
For instance, UK supermarket giant, Tesco, managed to reduce its annual refrigeration cost by 20% across three-thousand stores, simply by putting data analytics to use.
Businesses that analyse the masses of data they collate are able to put one foot ahead of the competition because they have access to automated decision-making systems that swiftly let them know of cost-cutting opportunities.
As any successful business owner knows, the ability to reduce overheads is key to remaining competitive in challenging markets, but risk management is also vitally important.
Big data analytics enables businesses to more easily identify potential hacks, policy breaches and instances of fraud. And this is a huge step forward when you consider how retrospective such activity has been in the past.
The ability to look ahead, pre-empt and build defences against potential risk will put you on something of a pedestal within the industry. Customers are more cybercrime-savvy than ever before, and the ability to extol the security benefits your business offers as a result of investing time in data analytics is a serious differentiator.
Wrapping up
It doesn’t matter how big or small your business is, or the industry within which it operates – data analysis will play a crucial role in providing you with the competitive edge you desire.
We hope this blog post has given you the impetus you need to delve into the goldmine of information you have at your fingertips and use it to your advantage.