Every company struggles with data - SMB’s most of all.
Consumer data is now more accessible for mining than it has ever been because of our increasing dependence on everything on the internet in recent years - smartphones helped too.
This means that businesses are acquiring massive amounts of data regularly, called data. Unfortunately, even though data is predicted to be genuinely revolutionary for SMBs, providing insights into company operations, a better awareness of market situations with competitors, and the ability to make more educated decisions - most SMBs face numerous challenges in harnessing the power of data.
The first step to overcoming these challenges is identifying them. So in this article, we’ll take a look at the top data challenges faced by small-medium businesses in 2022.
1. Estimating value of data
Many businesses mistake finding data to be a challenge but that’s rarely the case. Data with business value is everywhere - the real challenge lies within estimating the value of said data. Putting a price on data is important, especially for SMBs, as it helps them set a budget for data analysis.
With a value set, it’s important to look for a data platform that doesn’t break the bank. Thankfully, with low-cost analytics platforms like Cognera, the cost of analysis rarely exceeds the inherent value of the data.
2. Ingesting the right type of data
Ingesting the right data is another issue that SMBs encounter. SMBs must distinguish between “bad data” and data that is genuinely helpful, such as transactional data. Businesses will also look for data from questionnaires, surveys, and polls, both publicly and through the company’s own loyalty programs but it’s important to consider bad answers and biases while analyzing data. Bad data tends to taint good data, resulting in misguided marketing and other squandered efforts. Working with the incorrect type of data might be just as ineffective as refusing to utilize any consumer data at all.
That said, when a business does recognize good data, it’s important to be able to simply point your analytics engine to and begin processing quickly - something data platforms like Cognera do very well.
3. Analyzing data
For SMBs, the actual difficulty isn’t data collecting any longer but rather having too much of it. It’s really making sense of it all that’s challenging. As a result, developing a strategic business strategy based on poorly processed and analyzed data is a common occurrence.
SMBs should look for a data platform like Cognera instead of attempting to analyze data manually. Additionally, manual analysis of data is just not possible (we’re talking about terabytes of data). With the right data platform, marketers can recognize patterns and significant trends within the data that aid in making a more informed decision.
Wrapping up…
Despite its obvious advantage, businesses have conventionally struggled to recognize data as a source of actual economic value. However, that’s changing as SMBs have begun to grasp the strategic benefits that data technologies bring, and there are many forward-thinking SMBs prepared to invest in it.
But analytics is a challenging task to get right and SMBs won’t be able to get there without a reliable data analytics platform like Cognera to lay the groundwork.
