Are Microbusinesses Finally Welcome to the Data Insights Party?

Business intelligence and analytics have long propelled companies to the tops of their industries. Despite their impact, though, most BI platforms haven't made much of a mark on small and microbusinesses. While enterprises can draw from a wide range of data to understand their customers and industries, the average microbusiness owner often has had to rely on intuition and best guesses.

A lack of data analysis resources, poor BI product-to-market fit, and high costs are a few reasons BI hasn't historically made an impact on the way microbusiness owners run their operations. However, this picture is changing.

"Small businesses need BI just as much as enterprises do," notes Itzik Levy, CEO and co-founder of small business management app vcita. "Many small businesses only underwent digital transformations once Covid hit, as a survival tactic. The transition to fully digital business operations is an ongoing process, not a one-off effort."

Given the wealth of data that post-transformation microbusinesses now have access to, they're now in a great position to start optimizing operations and profit margins based on data insights.

Becoming Digital Natives

Why do today's microbusinesses have more access to useful internal business data signals than they had in years past? Data gathering typically involves installing complex infrastructure, and the average enterprise gathers data from its retail partners, logistics vendors, manufacturing line devices, and suppliers.

Microbusiness owners don't have such complex delivery systems or the vast customer base to guarantee their data sets would be statistically relevant. So where are these highly relevant datasets coming from? The answer lies in examining market trends over the past few years.

The business world was in the process of shifting online long before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and the digitalization trend only moved faster during the lockdown periods. Indeed, a great deal of microbusiness digital transformation took place in response to vendors' offices and retail outlets being locked down, moving the value chain to digital spaces. Conditioned by the ease of business online, people sourcing services, physical goods and even meals are unlikely to move back to in-person transactions.

Today's microbusiness owners can now access the globe when selling their services. For instance, a one-person ecommerce shop can sell its wares on several continents, thanks to the plug-and-play nature of apps and other solutions in their supply and delivery chain.

These connections give business owners all the data they need to understand their customers and reverse engineer market trends. For instance, a keyword analysis tool can quickly highlight what a business's competitors are doing well, allowing it to implement a new strategy immediately.

Social media has further expanded microbusiness reach. Where a small business was once confined to its zip code, modern microbusiness owners can search for industry trends using hashtags and following topics a social media platform suggests. Customers offer plenty of unstructured data via comments and post engagement.

The result is a wealth of data that microbusiness owners can now leverage. However, microbusinesses face the same issue that most enterprises do. Generating data is great, but turning it into insights is challenging. This is where BI made an impact on enterprises. It has the potential to do the same for microbusinesses.

Turning Data into Insights

Most BI platforms cater to large organizations. However, BI comes in different shapes these days. Most online platforms offer analytics as standard, thanks to consumer expectations. For example, Facebook and Google offer a wealth of data when running campaigns on their ad networks.

Microbusiness owners can analyze campaign data by location and identify where traffic is cheap. They can connect these datasets to free CRM tools like Hubspot and track their prospects' buying journeys. As mentioned before, keyword research tools give microbusiness owners information about which keywords their competitors are targeting and how much they're paying for them.

Thus, gaining market intelligence is relatively simple these days. Even data analysis and visualization are simple, thanks to free tools. Nabila Stapleton-Charles, Content Manager at small business management app Weave explains, "You can integrate Google Analytics with Google Data Studio to create advanced data visualization models that reveal not only historical data, but also include predictive analytics to help understand potential outcomes and prescriptive analytics to shape the future of your business."

While these tools are great, they cannot project results into the future. This picture is quickly changing though. Tools like Databox offer highly intuitive dashboards that offer great visualizations to estimate future results and trends. Others, like Rivery, allow businesses to connect diverse datasets to a single platform, enabling powerful analysis.

Business management platform vcita now offers a native suite of BI dashboards powered by Google's Looker, giving a microbusiness owner all the information they need in a single place. These businesses can even use specialized Reports to focus on specific aspects of their operations, such as payments, staff, clients and bookings. It all works straight away, too, since all of this data is already in the business's vcita account.

Another solution, Supermetrics, helps microbusinesses import and centralize their marketing data into dynamic spreadsheets, enabling easy analysis. One might think integrating all these solutions seamlessly is a chore, not to mention expensive. However, microbusinesses can use freelancer services from a platform like Upwork to simplify the process.

Whether setting up Google Analytics or connecting disparate datasets to a single platform, today's microbusiness owner is well placed to leverage the insights data offers.

A Data Revolution

Data is revolutionizing microbusinesses and empowering new entrepreneurs to rethink their business models. Instead of resource-heavy businesses, today's entrepreneurs focus on building nimble and integrated structures that respond quickly to changing conditions. Thankfully, in a manner that increasingly mirrors what's happening at enterprises, data analytics points the way forward.