Mom and Pop Wants to Play

According to TechCrunch, small businesses haven’t been able to reap the benefits of big data and SaaS applications, but 2013 will prove otherwise.

Chris Luo, VP of marketing at FiveStars, mentions his experience as senior marketing manager at Facebook, leading their SMB marketing team. Here, his team was able to access who their customers were, how they behaved, and how much money was spent on the adverts, by using an in-house data warehousing layer of Hadoop clusters, Hive.

At Facebook, his team was able to easily drive new trigger-based marketing campaigns, due to these in house tools, with minimal help. With all the automation and cloud solutions, visualization and data exploration is much faster than what it was in 2001.

Going back to small businesses, many of them are still using outdated technology, such as POS systems and cash registers, but 2013 will substantially change things.

Access

Small businesses with have greater access to data. An example being Euclid Analytics, who are enabling small businesses to access data on foot traffic. Also, SumAll is gathering data from social media sites, various google projects, and other e-commerce platforms and organizing them into a single dashboard.

Visualization

Since small businesses don’t have to time to use tools for deep exploration of data, companies like InsightSquared are catering specific ones for small business. They will provide insight at a glance, which coincides with the time constraint.

Automation

The one advantage small businesses will have over large ones is in behavioral marketing. Small businesses will not only be able to track web visits, but their customers’ visits to physical stores and new customers as well. FiveStars calls this “loyalty automation.”

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The ability for small businesses to keep up with the big boys is great. Big data allows for the capitalists to continue capitalizing, and the local mom and pops to continue providing local options.

Article: http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/21/big-data-and-saas-will-finally-become-relevant-for-small-businesses-in-2013/