Can Startups Leverage from Big Data? 

Big data is no longer an unknown term in today's era. It is being extensively used in industries to provide customer insights, analyze and predict customer behavior. Big data analyzing tools are no longer tools used only in the IT industries but have spread their wings in other domains like financial services, transportation, and logistics, e-commerce, aviation as well.

Another major area that is using big data tremendously is Startups. Big data visualization tools and big data mining tools make the entire process of analyzing big data much easier and affordable as well, thereby making it a key element for a startup’s toolkit.

Big data is an upcoming technology that no one should ignore. There are various ways you can leverage big data for your success. They help in exploring the room for product growth, studying the purchasing habits of customers and the market trends, which ultimately contributes to the optimization of cost and results in a better success story.

Around 75% of the startups say that their collection of data has increased exponentially. By the end of 2021, there will be around double the data that exists today, but only 40% of startups haven’t even considered leveraging big data solutions. With the increasing data, the need to sort this data efficiently is also increasing day by day. Once you arrange your data, studying your customers' preferable likes, dislikes, and possible future purchases would not be a complex task any longer. It is not costly, complex, or time-consuming.

Several startups are using big data tools because of their affordable nature. You only pay for the amount you use. Also, as the demand for handling data increased rapidly, many IT companies came up with their big data solutions which slowed down the first hype wave of them and thereby making it more affordable at reasonable rates. All big data solutions are very easy to understand, making them extremely user-friendly. You can enhance your sales and marketing, productivity, and customer experience by evaluating the results produced by the data analysis of your businesses. 

Following are the ways to use big data for startups:

To begin with some major advantages for startups, you can study your industry well. Companies generally post their annual reports among the public talking about their profits and future trends that would occur. If you opt for the manual or other old-school methods to analyze the entire data, it would not only cost you lots of time but also effort, which may even have some errors not noticeable by the human eye, or both. Instead, you can build a tracking tool that would monitor continuous trends and patterns, and compare them with those of the past to provide a complete overview of the current market scenario. 

Although such solutions need to be ordered as a service, as they are still not available as standalone packages, it reduces the overall cost to a large extent.

As discussed earlier, they are very helpful in understanding your customers, their assets, and preferences. 

You might be wondering how that happens? To make you understand better, imagine any housewife who purchases daily goods from the locality vendor. If the vendor can predict the purchasing pattern of them which depends upon their preferences, then he accordingly shows them their desired products which are targeted for them particularly. This not just saves the cost and time of the vendor, but also increases his reliability in the eye of its customers and will also bring more business to him.

Similarly, when big data is studied and segregated, startups can easily invest in ads, promotions, discounts, etc, and services upon the targeted audience which will yield more results at better prices.  

A quite similar use of big data can be done for targeting new customers and re-targeting the existing ones. Through the purchasing behavior and feedback of your customers, you can promote your businesses and act accordingly for the existing ones. By analyzing these patterns, one can provide better business solutions. New trends open gateways for new customers, and providing them their desirable services along with some feasible discounts would hit the right spot and help in winning the deal.

By measuring your insights, you can manage the sales, supply, and staffing process for your startups. These solutions will help you in understanding your internal areas of businesses like productivity, finance, labor, etc. You even get an idea about the lifetime values of your customers by measuring customer purchases and behavior. You can determine where the customers are leaving the process in between and focus on ways to improve it. This again saves your time and money in hand.

Reportedly, there has been a reduction in the cost of companies by about 20-30% with the aid of the information received through data analytics tools.

The way you use your data, you may use that of your competitors. Customers always share their feedback. They may or may not appreciate the good points but talk about the scopes of improvements out loud in various manners and you can work upon these flaws, understand their requirements, and give the customers what they exactly want. 

Conclusion:

Be it understanding your competitors, your customers, and their purchasing patterns, their social data, or your internal business areas of production, finance, sales, etc, big data or big data solutions can play a very vital role for any startup, business, or IT companies. One should always keep their eyes on the changing market patterns and react readily.