Small and medium sized businesses are beginning to recognize the opportunities big data presents for them. By offering transformative business insights, big data can help small companies improve decision-making, provide better business intelligence and maximize profits. Big data isn’t just for big businesses, but can be very useful for small businesses. The problem that most small companies have is in finding easy and cost effective ways to develop these big data solutions. Small companies do not have access to all the assets that big companies have to work with big data, such as data scientists, analysts and researchers. There are however tools and software that small businesses can use for their big data solutions. So here are 6 big data solutions that small businesses can use.
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics gives small businesses the tools needed to analyze their website data in one place. One of the advantages of using Google Analytics is that it’s easy to implement and can help you extract and analyze data to help reveal information that can help you make wise, data-driven business decisions. With Google Analytics, you can extract long-term data to reveal trends and other valuable information which can help you make better decisions when striving to meet your website’s or online store’s goals. You can also use Google Analytics to analyze social media traffic, allowing you to make changes to your social media marketing campaigns based on what is and isn’t working.
2. Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics is a platform that enables you to understand your customers based on their behavior. You can engage and segment your customers depending on their particular behavior. Kissmetrics can help boost your marketing return on investment. Kissmetrics also helps with eCommerce and boosts Instagram and Facebook ROI. Kissmetrics also offers users access to web-based training and educational resources to help them improve their marketing campaigns, including marketing webinars, how-to guides and articles.
3. SAS
SAS is an analytics service that turns your data into insights that can help inform decision making, as well as give you a new viewpoint on your business. SAS will help you gain new business and market intelligence that will give you fresh perspective on your business. SAS’s easy-to-use analytics service, which also provides automated forecasting and data mining; enables businesses that do not have a lot of resources the ability to accomplish more with less. SAS can help small businesses overcome challenges to grow and compete.
4. ClearStory Data
ClearStory Data offers advanced data mining and analytics tools that present information in a simple and understandable way. ClearStory Data combines your business’s internal data with publicly available information to help you make better business decisions. In addition to that, ClearStory Data can also provide department-specific data, including marketing, sales, operations and customer analytics.
5. InsightSquared
InsightSquared connects to popular business solutions you probably already use – such as Salesforce, QuickBooks, Google Analytics and Zendesk – to automatically mine and gather data and extract actionable information from that data. With InsightSquared, you don’t have to waste time mining your own data and arduously analyzing it. InsightSquared’s suite of products also includes marketing, financial, staff and support analytics tools, as well as custom reporting to let you slice and report data from any source in any way you choose.
6. IBM Watson Analytics
IBM Watson Analytics unifies all your data analysis projects into a single digestible platform. You can use it for all types of data analysis, including marketing, sales, finance, human resources and other parts of your operations. IBM’s Watson Analytics makes advanced and predictive business analytics easily accessible to small businesses and doesn’t require any skills for using complex data mining and analysis systems. IBM’s Watson Analytics automates the process for you, using it’s “natural language” technology to help identify business problems, recognize patterns and gain insights to answer key questions.