No business is too small for big data. Even for companies with tight budgets and a small workforce, some big data tools and solutions suit their needs and goals.

Big data equips small and large businesses alike with insightful information to effectively and efficiently use for marketing, designing, and manufacturing products that meet specific needs, enhance revenue, streamline operations, inventory management, and accurate forecasting.

In this article, you'll learn how your small business can leverage big data to successfully compete in today's marketplace.

1. Improve employee efficiency

Your employees generate a lot of data for your business daily. Using a cloud-based time-tracking tool, you can get an accurate report on how much time your employees spend on daily tasks such as meetings, breaks, and projects. This helps you keep tabs on their productivity.

Where you notice employees take more time than necessary to complete specific tasks, resource management software like resource rescheduling can help you assign tasks depending on employees' capability without over or under allocating their schedules. This helps to boost efficiency hence high productivity.

2. Enhancing project management

For a project to come to fruition, resources such as workforce, equipment, and facilities should be adequately managed to complete tasks on budget and schedule efficiently. It requires allocation and scheduling resources based on availability, capacity, effort, and project scope.

Effective resource scheduling helps you avoid work capacity and resource availability problems by enabling better organization, intelligent task distribution, real-time data analysis, and planning.

3. Monitoring competition

Big data technology allows you to check out your competitors without relying on gossip or spying on their websites. With readily available data, you can quickly tell what your competition is up to without leaving your office.

Using social media analysis and Google trends, you can tell the popularity of a product, service, or company.  You can then use the information you gather to compare your brand and see where you can improve to stay ahead of the competition.

In addition, beware that your competition can also track your business to see what you're doing. Keeping up to date with the latest big data technology can help you to smartly beat our competitors.

4. Understanding customer interests and preferences

Using big data analytics, you can get a complete picture of your customers; what excites them, what makes them buy, what they'll buy next, what can make them recommend your brand, why they can choose your competitor over you, and how they like to shop.

Businesses can also interact and engage with their customers on social media, via website, email, and messaging, then analyze the feedback data to help them improve their products and services. That enables you to enhance customer experience leading to client retention.

5. Cutting costs

Thanks to big data, businesses can identify redundant workflows and expensive processes that aren't paying off. Depending on the results, they can scale up or down, impacting their finances for the long term. For example, big data can help you track financial errors that may occur due to poor invoicing. Automating the invoicing process can help you eliminate mistakes, which helps to save costs.

6. Enhancing operations

Where business processes are connected and linked to one another, real-time data is generated. A business owner can then use this data to work towards improvement and efficiency. For instance, integrating live traffic data on delivery trucks that use GPS and sensors helps optimize the supply chain.

7. Employee recruitment and management

With many operations going digital, you can easily find data that can help you recruit the best talent, land the best recruiting agencies, and have good relationships with your employees. The human resource department collects data that helps monitor absenteeism, productivity, employee satisfaction, and reviews on personal development.

8. Creating better marketing campaigns

Big data helps you make informed marketing decisions for your business. It helps you identify different groups of target customers and how they're likely to respond to your marketing strategies. You're also able to tell who is buying from you, their age, location, where they hang out, what triggers their buying decisions, and a lot more.

This information helps you create content that best targets each group of prospects, thus not wasting your marketing efforts. Big data also allows you to keep tabs on the marketing trends you can incorporate into your strategies.

9. Identification of trends

Big data helps eliminate the guesswork for numerous processes and helps you to spot and monitor behaviors and patterns that help you predict how things are going, and how the demand of your brand will be affected over time.

By identifying trending topics on Facebook and Twitter, you're able to know what people want and how they want it. This helps tailor your products and services in a way that satisfies their needs and requirements.

Endnote

As sources of information continue to increase, businesses will most probably incline towards moving their services, products, and any other data into the cloud. This will help them leverage the benefits big data offers to businesses.