5 Reasons Why Big Data Analytics Matters For Your Business

• By Sunny Kumar
• 02-12-2020
• Big Data

Data is perhaps the most powerful weapon to yield against contemporaries. However, that can only happen if you know how to use it. The real value of data is obtained by leveraging the right data by making informed business decisions. To understand this better, data can be broken down into four proportions:

- The amount of data collected.
- Type of data collected - structured, semi-structured, or unstructured
- The speed at which data can be processed
- The reliability of data

Understanding these four parameters of data is key to driving it effectively and this is where big data analytics come into play.

In general terms, big data analytics is a process of collecting, organizing, and analyzing data to make informed decisions. Earlier businesses used to process and analyze data using traditional methods, like descriptive and exploratory analytics, which revealed performance results and discovered patterns but seldom made predictions about future behavioral patterns. They were quite inefficient and took eons to analyze data.

Big data analytics helps businesses make the right strategic moves by analyzing data in record time, helping make decisions way ahead of their competition.

Big data is fast-becoming an important asset for businesses to predict the future by assessing the past and present. It is estimated that by the end of 2020 businesses will save over $1 trillion from IoT because of Big Data. Even the entertainment sector uses big data to get a clear understanding of customer preferences. The web-based streaming platform Netflix saves $1 billion per year on customer retention - such is the market for Big Data.

Types of Big Data Analytics:
In real-time, big data analytics can be used to analyze competition, detect fraud, effectively manage traffic, predict customer preferences, etc. It is characterized using the 3V’s: Volume (amount of data), Velocity (speed of data flowing in and out), and Variety (types of data collected). And depending upon the usage there are 5 types of big data analytics:

- Predictive Analysis shows you the best way to tread forward by analyzing your data and predicting forecasts

- Prescriptive Analysis gives you the best recommendations to make decisions for the betterment of your business

- Diagnostic Analysis gives you a reason for repeating or eliminating a step or strategy i.e., it analyzes your past actions and helps you know the ‘why’ aspect

- Descriptive Analysis is all about the present that is it gives you real-time information based on your incoming data

The 5 Big Benefits of Big Data Analytics:

As we now understand the role of Big Data Analytics in businesses, let’s understand the benefits. The 5 biggest benefits of big data analytics are:

1. New Revenue Opportunities
New Revenue opportunities come from new ideas. And the amazing way with which big data analytics collects information makes way for businesses to push their ideas into the market. According to a BARC research report, businesses that use big data saw a profit increase of 8% and a 10% reduction in overall costs.

Big data boosts businesses to perform better, increase sales, and thereby revenue. It analyzes past data to efficiently use it for informed decision making. Big data also helps you effectively manage your customers by helping you know their wants and preferences.

Also, this analyzed data can help businesses target audiences interested in their niche and thereby increasing conversions which means a direct increase in sales. Big data is a game-changer for all businesses whose data increases in volume, velocity, and variety.

2. More Effective Marketing
Marketing is an effective tool when it comes to managing your leads, conversions, and customers. Big data reduces the marketing overheads by accurately targeting the customers.

Be it engaging your customers, improving loyalty, optimizing your performance, or generating more leads, big data is an indispensable part of marketing. Big data analytics allows you to gather and analyze data from multiple sources. You can get a 360-degree view of all your customers by analyzing their behavior and increasing brand engagement by sending them timely emails and specialized discounts, making them feel valued.

According to a McKinsey survey, intensive users of customer analytics are 23 times more likely to outperform their competitors in terms of new customer acquisition.

3. Better Customer Service
Customer expectations are increasing at an astronomical level and thanks to technology, customers are being able to view several different options before purchasing one.

Here big data analytics can help businesses analyze customer preferences and needs more quickly. It also increases customers’ loyalty by providing them with personalized experiences, making them feel special.

Moreover, predictive analytics can be used to utilize important events in a customer's life to connect with them on an emotional level. This increases your reputation in the market, enhances customer experiences, and therefore increases your revenue.

Big data analytics can also improve communication between you and your customers. This helps you get their feedback to focus on products that are more popular with your customers rather than focusing on all of them.

4. Improved Operational Efficiency
One of the most crucial steps in increasing the efficiency of a business is to adapt to changes as they happen and define the terms of growth despite the hurdles.

Big data analytics helps you while your data grows in terms of volume, velocity, and variety. With big data analytics by your side, you can discover new data, correlate it according to your use, and finally analyze it to make efficient-decisions and increase operational efficiency and productivity. Also, big data analytics helps you detect errors early-on, decreasing the production time.

For instance, in the food industry, big data analytics gathers required data in every geographical location to help them stock up the products preferred by customers that particular location. Hence big data not only increases customer satisfaction, but it also decreases the overall costs or expenses.

5. Advantage Over Competition
For any business to succeed, it is important to create and quickly implement a strategy that’s ahead of the competition.

Big data analytics gives you a clear road map of how this works - it understands how your business is working, analyzes your pre-existing and incoming data, and finally predicts the future of your business. This gives you an opportunity to devise a strategy that can improve the performance of your product or service against the competition, giving you a competitive edge.

In conclusion, big data analytics has a huge potential when it comes to providing value across all sectors. But it is also important that any business undertaking or implementing big data analytics should have a proper and clear understanding of how it exactly works to race ahead of their competitors. There are various mobile app developers are available to make your business idea into reality.