If youre a start up business you may or may not understand the depths big data can benefit you. Start ups, as much as anyone, can truly benefit from adopting big data in their efforts.
Big data is in the same way as any discipline, a very diverse field and this means that whether youre a butcher, baker of an app maker it can help you and here are some ways to adopt it.
1. Focus on Quality, and Not Only Quantity
Don’t focus only on immensity of data, but insights as well. Go beyond the velocity and volume of data that you can gather, and show what insights can be gleaned from it. Answer the “now what” and “so what” questions. When Big Data is being used in order to respond to customers better, do not provide them with too many choices. Be judicious instead and choose the best possible options. Having too much choice is about as good as having none. The abundance of available data shouldn’t lead to insights being scarce for customers and managers.
2. Identify What Your Sweet Spot Is
Telecommunications, banking and retail appear to be the leading three sectors for Big Data applications and generation. Experiential analysis can be used by all of them to leverage Big Data. However, other sectors can also learn from the success that these sectors have had with Big Data when it comes to activities like a new company formation, optimistion, real-time planning, sense and respond, risk management, precision targeting, personalised engagement, visualisation, rapid simulations and unified analysis.
3. Work on Your Pain Points
When are you sure that a company is ready to start utilizing Big Data solutions? Whenever it takes an entire day or longer to receive data analysis and inputs on important business activities.
These delays can impact how effective business decisions are and adversely affect revenues and returns. Industries that are primed for leveraging the new techniques include industries where Big Data is already being harnessed by adjacent industries, where the game is being changed by disruptors and where they are faced with a deluge of data. The increased intensity and velocity of competition is causing companies to start utilizing Big Data faster and sooner. Big Data combined with precision analytics allows for ‘nowcasting’ instead of only forecasting.
4. Find Your Cast of Characters and Story
Big Data makes is possible for you to really dig into the profiles and activities of your characters and create detailed persona. This allows you to trace your customer’s journey and create a story from the behavioural choices and data points. Marketers are now able to build customer profiles that have 10 to 15 trait categories for each type. This makes is possible to obtain new insights in real time on wants, needs, tastes, preferences and affinity. Anonyisation of data helps with dealing with concerns about customer privacy.
5. Hit Your Numbers
Make sure to show real numbers not only in terms of Big Data volumes, but also analytics and the impacts that are derived. As an example, showing how insights from Big Data can increase sales volume, make better kinds of cross-selling recommendations and improve conversion on an e-commerce website. Show how insights can be received not only from what consumers do on your site, but also what they aren’t doing- all in real time. A better business case can be built for Big Data when ROI figures are given for the long term as well as the short term.
6. Watch for the Regulator Aspect
Regulators are in some sectors indirectly driving Big Data to be adopted. For example, banks are required by banking regulations to track all fraudulent transactions. This makes it necessary to keep records of all telephone calls and have the ability to mine them.
7. Internet Of Things: The Current Hot Spot
Machine to machine communication (M2M) was addressed by earlier waves. We are currently in a wave called Internet of Things (IoT). At this point we are merely scratching the surface with this, as the costs for data gathering and industrial sensors keeps decreasing. This includes industry and enterprise IT in addition to B2C. For example, a lot of the action in telecommunications Big Data is focused on consumer mining of data and voice usage. However, other areas include tower installation optimisation and power utilisation using sensors inside the towers.
These are all ways that big data can help new startups and benefit them in the short and the long term.
