As an SME, do you also need to do 'something' with big data?

[jrineakter]

“The era of Big Data is clearly upon us”, I recently read in an online article. Wow, I thought, we are already writing big data in capital letters. If you believe the blogs, big data will change our marketing profession. But will big data really have that much impact or is it just a hype? And if I may speak on behalf of the SME, should we do something with it? Time to take a critical look at this subject.

What is big data?
Big data in marketing is simply a large collection of complex data about the behavior of your customers. Companies collect this data in order to better respond to the needs and wishes of their customers. Of course, there is nothing new about this, because market research has been important for years. But because a large part of our marketing activities now take place online, it is a lot easier to collect data.

Big data in marketing is, simply put, a large collection of complex data about the behavior of your customers.

The idea behind big data is that the data set is so incredibly large and complex that you can hardly process it with normal applications. This of course poses challenges for marketers, but also creates opportunities. Never before have we known so much about our target group. But because the amounts of data are so large, and it often consists of unstructured information, it is difficult to interpret it.

The phenomenon of big data can hardly be called a hype: you could say that it is currently maturing. In practice, this means that large companies are busy implementing it. Many australia telegram number list corporates are busy setting up data-driven strategies and implementing tools such as NoSQL and Hadoop . As with many new technological developments, you see that SMEs follow later. For example, I notice that this topic is now coming to life among SMEs.

Benefits of big data
As mentioned, collecting data about your audience has always been important to marketers. But think about how it was done 20 years ago. Back then, it was all about sales transactions, direct mail responses , and phone surveys. Now think about how we collect data today: we measure CTRs, mobile usage, social media interactions, browsing behavior, and geographic locations.

This way you can gain much better insight into who your customers are, where they are, what they want and how you can reach them. In addition, you can measure much better, which ensures that customers buy from you and stay with you.

Do SMEs have big data?
The reason that big data and SMEs are not very compatible is that SMEs often simply do not have big data. In addition, big data is so large and complex that you cannot analyze it with your usual tools. Furthermore, analyzing and interpreting this data is not easy and you really need specific expertise for that. Many SMEs do not feel like bringing that expertise in-house.

Therefore, you can also ask yourself whether big data is profitable for SMEs. You either need to recruit well-trained staff to arrange this for you or – more likely – invest in new tools. You can ask yourself whether you will earn back that investment. To do this, you need to ask yourself two questions.

Does big data really lead to more insight into my target group?
Do these insights actually lead to increased sales?
If the answer to both questions is 'yes', then big data could well be the answer. But be careful: don't confuse big data with statistics in general. After all, if you're looking for a charming apartment for one person, you don't want to live in a huge twenty-story apartment building. The same goes for data: if you just want to analyze your visitor statistics, a big data application is unnecessarily large.