In the last 20-30 years, the way we do business has changed at an extremely rapid pace. The risks, the necessary knowledge and the experience needed to start a new business are now much greater than they were, let’s say, half a decade ago. A lot of people tend to rush heads-on into the breach and grab their fortune purely based on instinct, which is all fine and well, but it rarely works without a hitch. Most of us don’t have enough financial leeway to allow ourselves to take a chance on a shot in the dark. If we take a closer look at the history of the most successful new companies and businesses, we will find that their success is mostly credited to their innovation and the ability to anticipate the market’s “future”, making them one of those companies that can offer you something fresh.
Big data: Chaos reigns
I find it funny that there is more data being produced everyday than there was collectively on the entire Web some twenty years ago. The reason behind all this? Well, let’s take business and entrepreneurship as an example, shall we?
When it comes to the data gathered in the age of brick and mortar businesses, we could get some small insight into the effectiveness of our marketing efforts, the habits and taste of our customers and derive some potentially useful data from sales analytics. However, we are talking about incomplete data, which kind of served the purpose of hinting you in the right direction and substantiating your gut feeling, instead of providing factual information that you can use as the basis for your future actions. These days, things have changed drastically. E-Commerce websites can get access to so much information just by adding a few plug-ins downloaded from CodeCanyon.
You can gain exclusive access to data about each individual customer’s browsing habits, reactions to recommendations and reviews, wish lists and so on. You can adapt your website to pop-up recommended products for specific customers, based on their previous browsing history by using various algorithms. Marketing is the most interesting side of things when it comes to new data. Before the Internet became an essential part of our lives, you had no idea if your new commercial was a success or complete bust. You could only hope that when the sales invoices come, you won’t run into a nasty surprise. These days, people instantly tell you what they think, without you even asking. YouTube comments, up votes and down votes, social network feedbacks, these are all things you can gain access to with minimum effort and see how things are going by using webmaster tools such is Google Analytics. The same is true for new products, customer satisfaction, new trends and much more.
Troubles with management and data deciphering
A large part of the information gathering process is automated, that much is certain and new ways come up every day. The main problem is who is going to analyze this much data and draw the right conclusions. It is all done step by step and it can be a very dreadful job, having to deal with this much information. An average market research report is usually delivered in tomes and tomes of statistics, which you need to decipher in order to get what you need. Also, the conversion of traditional documentation into digital form can be a bother. Thankfully, there are companies out there that deal with data conversion, regardless of which form it comes in and this makes things a bit easier.
The next step is automated data analysis, full or at least partial. This will shorten the time needed to get concrete evidence that a particular course of action will give specific results and greater balance between supply and demand.
The growth of the Internet universe
Businesses that operate without any representation on the Web are slowly becoming a thing of the past. There are simply too many benefits of doing business over the Web to ignore them. Every day, the number of business websites rises by great amounts and not without good reason, not to mention the amount of new business websites that function exclusively over the web. If you are thinking of investing into your internet foothold, you are probably making the right move, but you should be aware that it will take work to break through and establish a firm stand.