Big data analytics is the hot new trend which is dominating the industry circle talks today. The potential of Big Data Analytics is immense, and businesses all over the world are taking the help of professional Big Data Analytics companies to sift out valuable information from the data that they collect.
Understand your customers better
Understanding the customer is absolutely essential for the success of any enterprise. With the help of big data, you can create accurate customer personas which will help your business in understanding your customers in a much better and more profound manner.
Customer personas represent a particular segment of the customer. By feeding large quantities of data like age, gender, ethnicity, employment status, marital status and income level into a Big Data Analytics system, you can build up a wide variety of well-defined customer personas.
By creating accurate customer personas, you can predict with fair accuracy, how a particular customer will behave in a situation. By understanding the likes, dislikes and preferences of your customers, you can create compelling, personalized marketing messages and advertising campaigns.
Big data not only helps you in building user personas, but it also helps you in improving your efficiency. By analyzing the purchase data of your customers, you can find out the average purchase size, which will help you in devising strategies to increase this amount. You can bifurcate this metric further by analyzing the average purchase size by different customer segments. You can also investigate the effect of promotions on the average purchase size.
Big Data Analytics can also help you in finding the average customer acquisition and retention cost. If the customer acquisition cost is higher than the average lifetime value of your customer, then your business is heading for trouble.
Similarly, by analyzing the numbers of customer retention cost, you can quickly identify the factors that are contributing to your customer retention. It is generally seen that it is much easier to retain a customer than to acquire a new one. This data will also help you in picking up the brains of your customers in terms of your customer service. If customers are not happy with your service, then the customer retention numbers would be inadequate.
Another vital evaluation that your business can conduct via Big Data Analytics is to find out whether the intended customer is buying from your brand or someone which you did not expect is buying more. This will help you re-aligning your strategy accordingly.
Reduce costs
Big Data Analytics help you in reducing costs in various areas of your business. By analyzing the digital footprints of customers on your website, it is possible to track the buying journey of a customer. This will help your company’s marketing strategists to devise an effective marketing strategy to target the customers at the best time during this buying journey. This helps in reducing the marketing costs by channelizing all your marketing energies into the most effective place. Businesses struggling to reduce costs can also look into title loans Houston for support.
Big Data Analytics is being increasingly used in logistics to analyze the condition of the vehicle and the driver. The data received from various IoT sensors placed on the logistics vehicle can provide valuable insights regarding multiple things like Driver fatigue, tire pressure, the weight of the vehicle, whether the driver is overspeeding. When the driver is driving optimally, the chances of damage to the vehicle are significantly reduced. Fuel consumption can also be reduced when the driver is operating at optimal speeds. Through Big Data Analytics, you can send constant notifications to the driver if he/she is not driving correctly and hence help in reducing the cost.
Also, by monitoring the condition of the vehicle, the maintenance schedule of the vehicle can be optimized, leading to a drastic reduction in costs.
Apart from logistics, big data can help in making the entire supply chain operation efficient. For example, Pepsico is a brand which is using Big Data Analytics to provide just in time delivery of the correct products in correct quantities to its retailers. The retailers provide the data of their inventory and their POS to Pepsico, and the sophisticated big data systems in the company predict when and in how much quantity will the retailers require a particular product.
Big Data Analytics can also help in reducing employee attrition rate. By analyzing trends related to employee satisfaction, it can be predicted whether the employee is frustrated with your company and is planning to leave. Big Data Analytics can also help in avoiding costly mis-hires by predicting whether the employee would be able to fit into the company culture or not.
Online fraud is increasing and is a primary concern, especially for e-commerce companies. E-commerce companies can detect and prevent the occurrence of online fraud by analyzing big data trends. For example:- The e-commerce companies can identify which customers or areas are most likely to default on COD payments.
Explore different avenues of revenue
Using big data analytics, your business can wedge up new sources of revenue. Take the example of a bank, isn’t it possible that by analyzing the data of various companies that come to a bank for a loan, it can provide consultancy services to businesses who apply for a new loan. This way, apart from its money lending business, the bank can enter into the lucrative business consulting firm using the data which is already with it.
A company which is using big data to explore new business streams is The weather channel, which has created a new marketplace known as weatherFX. This marketplace gives valuable information to the advertisers about the effects of weather on the mood of the customers. Using this information, advertisers can create more engaging advertisements and improve their revenues by selling related products and services according to the weather. Thus by using Big Data Analytics, TWC converted their existing data into a wonderful business stream.
Process optimization
Using Big Data Analytics, your business can achieve high-levels of process optimization.
Using the data generated on a production floor, the manufacturing process can be optimized. Big data can provide useful insights about how to reduce the cycle time of a product, how to reduce the machine breakdown time and how to reduce the number of resources(raw materials, water, electricity) that are used in a process. Big data can also help in improving the quality of the product by suggesting improvements in the existing production methods.
Big Data Analytics can help in predicting the best route according to the weather and traffic conditions, thus optimizing the delivery process. This can prove to be especially useful in the delivery of perishable food items as on-time delivery is critical for the success of the food business. Apart from this using Big Data Analytics one can predict the effect of delivery time on the quality of the food, thus helping in reducing wastage of food during transportation.
Using Big Data Analytics, an organization can effectively gauge the reaction of the customers by conducting a sentiment analysis, which is basically a process in which we monitor the social media chatter of the customers about our brand. This helps the companies in improving their processes. For example:- if there is too much negative chatter regarding the product’s finishing quality on social media, then the concerned department can be alerted about it, and necessary corrective action can be taken accordingly.
Big Data Analytics can be implemented in the field of Marketing and insights can be gained regarding the best marketing offers, which shall help in attracting a large user base. Big Data Analytics will help your company in identifying the buying preferences of the users and accordingly align the marketing efforts of your company. For example:- you can save precious marketing funds by targeting it towards the customers who have high propensity to buy your product/service instead of taking a mass-market approach. Thus process optimization in marketing can be achieved by using Big Data Analytics.
Removing organizational silos
Silos in organizations is a significant problem. When different departments compete instead of co-operating with each other, then your organization starts facing issues related to productivity. Big data systems rely on sharing data with each other. Hence when you implement a big data system you can easily break the organizational silos, as to get the optimum benefit from Big Data Analytics system all your departments have to be open about their data and share it with others.
Improve your advertisements
As discussed earlier, Big Data Analytics helps you in creating accurate user personas. By using the insights obtained from these user personas, marketers can improve their advertisements. By making ads which are in-line with the preferences of various customer segments, the ROI of marketing campaigns can be drastically improved.
Big data helps you to deliver the right content to the right audience at the right time, thus improving the effectiveness of your advertisements.
Big data also helps in eliminating fraud in ad-viewing. According to a report published on Bloomberg, more than 1 in 4 of your audiences viewing your video ads are not humans, but bots. By using Big Data Analytics, you can clearly separate the bots from real humans and stop wasting your money.
Better Risk management
Mitigating risk is an essential part of any business. To remain profitable in these fast-changing times, companies must take calculated risks. Using Big Data Analytics tools, you can prepare your business for upcoming threats and identify the potential loopholes in the system.
Using Big Data Analytics, companies can reduce the risks involved in decisions. Take the example of Netflix, using Big Data Analytics, the company interpreted the interest of consumers in drama shows. It hence was able to determine accurately that ‘House of Cards’ would be the most appropriate show to buy.
A bank from Singapore called the united overseas bank has implemented a Big Data Analytics system which helps it in reducing the risk calculation time of a potential investment drastically. Thus the bank can gain leverage over their competitors by evaluating the risk of investment faster.
Read Related: Important Requirements to Handle Big Data
Winding-up
By investing in Big Data Analytics, you will not only realize substantial gains in your business but also secure your business against future problems by identifying problem creating patterns today. Big Data Analytics puts the power in your hands and allows you to utilize your resources efficiently. In whichever business you are, your company is currently sitting on a data goldmine, and you can quickly uncover this goldmine by employing the services of efficient Big Data Analytics companies and putting your data to use.
