No matter what type your business is, data analysis always plays a vital role in providing you a competitive edge and bring innovation in the way you do your business. Collating data to discover new business opportunities and meet customer expectations is not something very new, dating back to the decade of 70s. However, what has significantly changed since then is the amount of data growing everyday, its diversity and analytics techniques to make sense out of it.

The term Big Data was coined considering the abundance of data that exists today in structured, semi-structured and unstructured form. According to a new report from IBM Marketing Cloud, 90% of data that exists today was created in the last two years alone. The report further adds that nearly 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is created every day from numerous sources, like social media sites, business apps, public web, sensors connected to Internet of Things, etc.

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In contrast to previous times when rudimentary data analytics was used to make future decisions, advanced big data analysis of today allows business managers to have real-time information and make immediate decisions. There is no denying the fact that big data has become the need of the hour to understand hidden patterns and correlations, identify target audience, uncover new revenue opportunities, boost marketing efforts, offer better customer service, and improve productivity. Let’s understand in detail how information derived from big data can help you get competitive advantage over your rivals.

How Big Data enables You to Beat Competition

Allows to offer Personalized Experiences

Acquiring customers is not enough to compete with your rivals. You also need to understand the needs of your customers and optimize their buying experience. Since customers interact a lot on the internet and look for products they want to buy in near future, big data analysis allows you to identify them and offer them what they want, not something they are not interested in. Doing so increases the chances of a customer to buy a product of their choice from you by many folds.

Having a good insight into a customer’s personality, attitude, buying behavior, etc. helps you make them feel personally valued, which increases their trust in your brand. Having valuable information of customers readily available paves the way for business managers to devise effective strategies and improve conversion rates. If you have a website for your business, you can analyze data to personalize the content in real time to meet diverse requirements of consumers based on their sex, nationality, etc.

Click here to read about “How Will Big Data Impact Effective Lead Generation for better Conversions.”

Enhances Productivity

It also helps organizations enhance productivity. For good productivity, it’s important to understand production volume patterns, correlation with demands, and patterns from unstructured data, like social media feeds, blogs, videos and other sources. With big data, it becomes possible for organizations to get useful insights from both structured and unstructured data, which in turn helps expedite varied processes and boost productivity.

Besides, many organizations are now using big data to analyze employees’ performance. As a result, they are able to improve office productivity. By using devices like motion sensors, employers can keep a track of employee activity and understand them better, which in turn helps managers devise strategies to encourage them and improve productivity.

According to a study by Evolv, data analysis has proven to be a great way for getting insights into employees’ behavior and increasing productivity in the workplace. Max Simkoff, co-founder and CEO of Evolv, says, “CIOs have been charged with leveraging the right products to increase employee productivity. Unfortunately, much of that work revolved around guessing what employees wanted and what they didn't. With help from big data, it appears that far more insight can be gleaned from employees’ behavior and, in turn, improve their job performance.”

Helps Understand What Works for You and What Doesn’t

One of the best advantages of big data is to be able to learn about the efficacy of your marketing efforts. For example, marketers can determine which sort of content has been most effective at moving leads through a marketing and sales funnel. Similarly, they can also deduce what’s not working for them. Therefore, business managers can devise marketing strategies based on what’s most likely to become propitious for them and boost ROI.

Small businesses can also see how popular their brand is becoming among customers and keep on improving their products or services to keep growing the list of loyal customers. One of the major reasons cited by most businesses to use big data analysis is to improve business operations. If there’s an operational problem, a real-time insight into errors will help take quick actions to fix it, thereby not allowing the operation to fail or force your customers to go somewhere else.

Reduces Business Costs

Big data analysis also helps businesses save significant costs. By putting it to use, the supermarket chain Tesco successfully brought down its annual refrigeration cost by 20% across 3,000 stores in the UK and Ireland. With the help of IBM's research laboratories in Dublin, Tesco got useful insights into gigabytes of refrigeration data, which helped the company uncover that refrigerators in many of their stores in Ireland were running at lower temperatures than needed.

Niall Brady, IBM's research engineer for intelligent buildings and energy analytics, said, “We developed a set of key performance indicators [KPIs] that looked at data aggregated every month over a year. Without knowing anything about how the refrigerators should perform, we could identify when they were behaving in an anomalous way.”

In a nutshell, big data has enough potential to serve the purpose of automated decision systems to let managers know any cost-cutting opportunity and swiftly act on it.

Helps Improve Risk Management

It enables to not just offer better products and reduce costs, but manage operational, technical and financial risks as well. Hacks, frauds, policy breach, etc. are some of the risks that could be taken care of by putting big data analytics into use. Unlike previously when it was difficult to analyze fraud patterns, identify unscrupulous traders, etc, it’s now possible to have highly effective risk management programs by using big data analysis.

Financial institutions are at the highest risk of frauds, which is one of the major reasons why most banks now use big data to monitor all transactions in real time and preempt suspicious activities. CFOs across many sectors now rely on big data analysis for efficient risk monitoring and prepare for worst-case scenarios. Palantir Technologies, a data analytics company which has clients including the FBI and CIA, is also helping Wall Street firms to detect frauds. The crux is the fact that big data could definitely provide you a competitive edge by allowing you to manage risks and prevent money loss in a much better way.

For big data analysis, there are many tools available in the tech market. You can choose the one that best fits your requirements. To ease your quest, you can click here to check out “7 Tools for Successful Big Data Analytics.”

Considering all the virtues of big data mentioned above, it’s worth saying that businesses can reap many benefits that were not possible before. Data is like currency, but it’s only useful when you can make sense out of it and incorporate the wisdom earned into your business processes, marketing campaigns, customer service strategies, they way you react to changing trends, etc. It’s no hyperbole to say that big data is the key to outperform competition and cash in on new opportunities of growth.

What are your thoughts on the potential of big data to help businesses get a competitive edge? Have you ever used big data before to give a boost to your business? Your views are highly welcome, please get in touch with Evon Technologies, a software development company that provides AWS data integration services.