Big data is big news in today’s digitized world. With the explosion of Internet usage and social media networks, there’s a massive cloud of data being generated about people all over the world, and it’s growing at an exponential rate.

Until recently, big data has been a mining center for big business to learn more about customer behaviors, desires, trends and browsing or buying patterns. It takes a sophisticated system and considerable computing power to sort through all that information and pull something useful out of it.

However, technology has advanced in power—and come down in price. Now, even small businesses can tap into the power of big data to improve the customer experience and boost bottom lines.

Analytics: The Key to Using Big Data

The term “big data” covers a lot of ground. Data is collected from every action that’s performed on an Internet-connected network—sending an email or tweet, posting to Facebook or a blog, commenting or rating, updating a profile, shopping online, using a cell phone or tablet, even swiping a credit card at a physical store. Every action generates a digital footprint that’s stored somewhere in the ether.

That’s a lot of data. To obtain useful information from this vast ocean, you’ll need some serious analytical power that can find the relevant bits and display them in a format you can understand. Fortunately, that power is both affordable and accessible through various platforms from free programs like Google Analytics to inexpensive business tools like customer relationship management (CRM) software.

What Can Your Small Business Do With Big Data?

If you’re looking to tap into the vast, rich landscape of big data, there are a number of avenues to explore.

Sort Through Your Social Media

You’re already connected to many of your customers through your business social media networks,aren’t you? Well, the data collection doesn’t have to stop there. Tools like Social Mention, Twilert, and Kurrently let you set up alerts and notifications whenever a subject is mentioned online like your business itself, the products or services you offer or any relevant keyword.

Once you start tracking these mentions, you can tailor your responses and conversations to build buzz, generate more interest and improve customer satisfaction and engagement.

Collect Customized Data With CRM

There are many inexpensive (even free) CRM systems that offer fully featured platforms to track interactions with customers and prospects. Programs such as Insightly, Zolo, and Nimble not only provide an inside line to big data, but also help you sort through it and pinpoint the most helpful information.

These platforms also include social media functionality, so you can streamline your big data collection from multiple sources.

Monitor and Mine Customer Calls

Whether you’re working with a few office lines, a VoIP system with mobile capabilities, or a third-party call center, customer service calls can be an important source of data. Be sure you’re collecting your call logs and analyzing the information.

Customer call data can help you:

• Discover the demographics of your callers.
• Identify the most common problems that result in a phone call.
• Analyze inbound calling trends.
• Optimize customer service through strategic call routing.

Many web-based VoIP systems include analytics and automated call logs, and they’re also an inexpensive solution for business voice needs.

How can your small business take advantage of big data?

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No matter what they’re shopping for or where the transaction takes place, customers like to feel as though the experience takes their preferences into consideration. This includes online shopping. In fact, conversion rates are typically higher when online personalization is involved.

So how can you create an individual experience for your website visitors that converts more of them into paying customers?

Fortunately, you don’t have to invest a ton of money in sophisticated platforms that track, analyze and respond to your visitors’ every click. There are simple and inexpensive ways to make your customers feel virtually welcome.

4 Online Personalization Strategies for Your Business

Ask Them What They Want

The best practice to find out what your customers really want is to conduct an online survey. Online surveys are everywhere these days, and most people are comfortable filling them out. You can create a survey that lets customers tell you about their preferences as part of your website’s registration process and then use that data to suggest product or service options that match up.

Here’s a quick hint: Keep the survey short. A questionnaire that goes on for pages and pages (or scrolls down forever) is going to lose interest. Many visitors will simply head for a search engine to find a less complicated sign-up process.

Give Them a Voice

As proven by the popularity of social media, people are more influenced by recommendations from peers and friends than by company-driven marketing material. They also have their own opinions they’d like to share with others.

If you don’t already have a system for customer reviews and opinions on your website, consider getting one. Consumer-driven reviews give your company a more personal touch. Include plenty of social sharing tools, so your customers can tell their friends about their great experiences with your business.

Now Featuring: You

Everyone loves a little time in the spotlight. When you showcase not just your products or services, but also your customers, you create a friendly atmosphere that shows there’s more to your business than pixels on a website. You can also stir up your visitors’ competitive spirit by offering a chance to be featured on your site.

Invite your customers to send in their stories, photos and even videos about their experiences with your company, and create a customer-centric area to show off the responses.

Let’s Keep in Touch

Never underestimate the power of the follow-up, especially when it’s personalized. Tracking your visitors’ activity on your website is great, but it’s even better when you contact those visitors and ask helpful questions, such as whether they were able to find what they needed, or if there’s anything else you can do for them.

You should also follow up with customers who have purchased products or services from you, and maintain the personal touch. If the customer had a good experience, don’t be shy about asking for referrals. Most people enjoy sharing positive finds.

It doesn’t take a lot of extra time or money to interact more personally with your online customers, and these changes will help you bring more business to your website.

More customers means the results can be exponential for your profit margins.

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Crowdfunding is one of the hottest new strategies for small business owners and entrepreneurs to raise capital for their startups, expansion projects or new ideas. This investing style first saw widespread use in 2012, mostly through online platforms like Kickstarter and GoFundMe, and it’s still going strong for 2013.

What is crowdfunding?

Basically, it’s getting a whole bunch of people, the “crowd,” to believe enough in the concept of your business or idea to donate small amounts of money, often in exchange for rewards that range from acknowledgements to free products or services. The best part? These are donations and therefore, don’t have to be paid back.

However, there are good and bad parts to crowdfunding on both sides of the equation. Not every business idea is a good candidate for this platform. With crowdfunding expected to double in 2013, how does your business or idea measure up?

Crowdfunding Pros and Cons

Aside from the obvious advantage of not going into debt on your investment, crowdfunding can offer some great benefits. When you use a crowdfunding platform, you’re already receiving market exposure before you get off the ground. You can rack up quite a lot of investment capital. For donors, it’s exciting to feel like they’re helping to build a concept they believe in.

The downside is that crowdfunding is still in its infancy and therefore, not regulated. There are no guarantees for entrepreneurs and businesses, and no legal recourse for investors should your concept fail. While it sounds like free money, the fact is that you still have to offer your investors something in return — and if you don’t follow through, your credibility is shot.

Checklist: Your Crowdfunding Potential

Is your business or idea conducive to crowdfunding? What is your crowdfunding potential? Below are some questions to ask yourself:

• Is your business or concept truly unique or is there an aspect that makes you stand out? Does it make most people say, “Wow, that’s awesome!”
• Does your company or idea have strong, lasting growth potential? Is this concept more than a fad or passing trend?
• Will your business be able to sustain interest in the long run without becoming outdated?
• Is your company or idea based on concepts, wants or desires that appeal to a broad, general audience and not just a niche group?

If you answered these questions with a resounding “yes,” then you have some crowdfunding potential and crowdfunding could be a great fit for you. If you’re not there yet, your best bet is to sit back and watch the crowdfunding landscape and be alert for new or changing opportunities.

Will you be giving crowdfunding a try as a financing option for your new business?

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Technology is a wonderful thing. Now that just about every imaginable gadget is portable and affordable, your small business doesn’t have to be confined to a rented office or your dining room table. You can create a mobile office and take your work anywhere, with room to spare with the use of mobile broadband in your small business.

There are plenty of advantages to having a fully mobile office. Just a few of them include:

• Cost savings (i.e. the overhead for a fixed office).
• Increased productivity — no more wasted downtime.
• New promotional opportunities, since you can network in person.
• Streamlined business processes, with everything in one place.

So how do you create the perfect mobile office? Below are the basic considerations for finding the right mix of technology to serve your small business on the go.

How to Create a Mobile Office for Your Small Business

Command Central: Laptop or Tablet?

Smartphones have come a long way in a short time, with bigger screens and more capabilities, but they’re still not enough to power your mobile office alone. You’ll need either a laptop or a tablet PC.

The right choice depends on your business and your daily activities. If you do a lot of typing and document creation, it’s best to go with a laptop. Otherwise, you may be able to work with a smaller, lighter tablet. A tablet is also a good choice because it frees up your business by allowing you to do things your laptop can’t, such as using apps for paying and receiving invoices.

Of course, you’ll still need a primary machine for storage, backups and heavy projects, but choosing the right mobile computer means you won’t have to spend most of your working time chained to a desk.

Staying Connected When Hot Spots Get Cold

There are more WiFi hot spots than ever but they never seem to be around when you need them. Additionally, public Internet access is never secure. For your mobile office, you’ll need a reliable, private connection for your laptop or tablet.

If you don’t spend much time online, you can use prepaid wireless Internet cards that run on 3G or 4G mobile networks. For businesses that require heavy Internet use, there are long-term solutions like high-speed mobile access cards with data plans similar to smartphones. You can also get a MiFi, a compact wireless router that acts as a portable, personal hot spot.

Building Your Virtual File Cabinets

Going mobile means a mostly paperless office, so you’ll need a place to store your virtual files — preferably with anywhere access, so you can share files between your primary machine, command center and smartphone.

There are plenty of cloud storage solutions to help with that. Some are straightforward virtual hard drives, like Box.com and Dropbox. Others come bundled with cloud software you’re likely to use anyway, such as Microsoft’s Office 365 and Intuit’s Online Plus programs,  QuickBooks and Payroll.

Extras: Peripherals and Apps You Might Need

Depending on your business functions, you may need a portable printer, scanner or other peripheral hardware for your mobile office. Whatever you bring along, don’t forget to keep power cords and chargers on hand, and you should also invest in a travel-sized surge protector to protect your equipment.

What apps will you need? In addition to the software you use for your business, you might consider:

• A payment processor like Intuit’s GoPayment or PayPal’s smartphone card swipe device (free for business use).
• A voice recorder app for capturing thoughts and notes when you can’t use your laptop or tablet.
• GPS capabilities for navigating unfamiliar territory.
• A voice and video connection platform like Skype for virtual conference calls.

As a small business owner, you may have dreamed about working from the beach. Technology has made that possible and now you can have a truly mobile office that goes with you anywhere. With a little planning, you’ll be ready to take your show on the road.

Working Mobile Photo via Shutterstock

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Every small business needs an arsenal of online tools to achieve business success without breaking the bank.  In today’s “freemium” world, many companies offer low-cost or even free online management tools that will help you stay sane and effective as a manager while increasing your productivity.

Best of all, they do the job without putting pressure on your pocketbook.  Below are six of them worth a serious look.

6 Low Cost Online Management Tools

Box

The ability to efficiently share important files such as spreadsheets, documents and presentations with your team, customers and other partners is crucial. Box, a cloud-based file sharing and storage solution, makes it easy to share files without complicating the way you normally work.

Getting started is a snap: Just drag and drop your content from your desktop to Box, even really large files. Be sure to check out the BoxSync download that lets you keep the content on your computer in sync with Box.

As a small business owner, you can enjoy instantaneous file backup, easy file sharing and the ability to access files from multiple computers and mobile devices.

Freshbooks

FreshBooks is all about making accounting fast and simple and was designed specifically around the needs of small business owners. Just add your customers and you can easily generate professional-looking invoices and send them with the click of a button and even accept online payments.

One of the best things about Freshbooks is that although it’s easy to use, it still boasts a lot of really great features that help you stay organized when it comes to your money. Things such as reports, time tracking and expense tracking. Freshbooks is a cloud service, so your data is backed up and accessible from remote locations.

You also can access Freshbooks from all your favorite gadgets, such as your smartphone or tablet.

Insightly

Providing your customers and prospects with world-class service is something you strive for every day because you know how critical it is. Making sure that you and your team stay on the ball and even improve those efforts, especially as you grow, is a different story.

With the right blend of horsepower and ease of use for small business, Insightly’s CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software can help. It allows you to collect, organize and share important contact information so that you can manage the relationship more successfully and create a better customer experience.

Insightly offers a simple, friendly user-interface, which is a huge plus, both for getting set up quickly and for getting familiar with the system. It integrates tightly with tools such as Gmail and Google Apps, so it will work well with systems you already have in place. With built-in project management tools such as tasks, milestones and notifications, you stay organized and deliver on time. Because the information is centralized, everyone on your team who needs to know what is going on can stay in the loop.

A cloud-based system with anytime, anywhere access, Insightly offers modern features demanded by savvy small businesses, such as smartphone access and social media integration.

MeetingBurner

Meetings and conference calls are an integral part of daily business activity. By introducing Web conferencing tools such as MeetingBurner, you can effectively and cheaply connect with customers and other colleagues who are far away.

Save yourself the expense and time involved in a business trip by using the Web for your next meeting. Simply schedule the meeting from within MeetingBurner, add it to your calendar and then email your participants the instructions provided. MeetingBurner automatically generates a conference call line that participants dial into as well as a website link to click on so they can see whatever you want to share with them from your computer.

MeetingBurner works for both Mac and PC, and will even send everyone reminders about upcoming meetings.

Mail Chimp

Email marketing with newsletters can be a terrific, cost-effective way to engage your customers and Mailchimp helps make it all painless and relatively quick. How do you build your list? What do you do when someone doesn’t want to receive emails anymore? What is the appropriate size when you’re designing an email newsletter? How do you know if people are looking at the emails you send? Mailchimp handles all of that for you – and more.

At its core, it helps you build your list, wrap your message in a pretty package, blast it out and track the results of your campaign.  Other notable features include the ability to segment your mailing list, so you can target your messages according to the different needs of your customers and to integrate with services already in use by small businesses everywhere, such as Freshbooks, Google Analytics, Facebook, WordPress and Magento.

HootSuite

Is your small business leveraging multiple social media channels as part of your core marketing strategy? Are you looking for a smarter way to take control of your social media activity? Then give HootSuite a whirl. Hootsuite is a social media management tool that gives you a centralized place for managing, tracking and measuring all of your different social networks, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google + and more.

Because Hootsuite is a cloud solution, all you need to access the service is an Internet connection and Web browser. Plus, HootSuite boasts a wide range of mobile apps to help users on the move.

From CRM to email marketing to social media, your small business solutions can be the difference between a smooth sailing enterprise and an ugly crash on the rocks.  Fortunately for today’s small business owner, the modern world is competitive. That means more free online management tools than ever before.

What free or low cost online management tools have made your business life easier?

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When you’re running a small business, time is literally money. Without a salary or a clock to punch, the only time you’re making money is when you’re working. Unfortunately, this leads too many small business owners to work extra hours – and eventually burn out.

This infographic from Maven Link demonstrates the value of time for small business owners. A few highlights:

• 72 percent of small business owners work evenings and weekends.
• 53 percent say the hardest thing about their business is wearing multiple hats – and 46 percent fill 3 to 4 employee roles on a given day.
• 25 percent, or 1 in 4, say that one extra hour in a working day is worth more than $500 to them.

There’s no question that if you want your small business to succeed, you need to put in the work, but it doesn’t have to be 60 to 80 hours’ worth every week. Follow these tips to squeeze more hours out of your working days and get more done in less time.

6 Time Saving Tips to Shave Hours Off Your Week

Go Mobile

Your smartphone can let you work on the go, anywhere you happen to be. There are plenty of timesaving apps for small business owners, and many will also help you automate tasks and keep things organized—saving more precious minutes.

Look for apps that cover tasks like bookkeeping, invoicing, appointment scheduling, document sharing and more. You’ll be surprised by how much time you save. A study by the Small Business and Entrepreneur Council, Saving Time and Money With Mobile Apps (PDF) finds that apps save small business owners an average of 5.6 hours a week.

Don’t Stay Attached to Your Phone

You’ve probably heard the popular time management advice to limit the number of times you check your email. But are you applying this advice to your phone?

Text messages can suck up just as much time as your email. How much time would you save if you didn’t pick up your phone every time it buzzes or chimes? If you have a hard time ignoring incoming texts or messages, try turning your phone off during business hours until you need it.

If your cell is your primary business line, limit interactions to calls only and designate a few times a day to go through texts.

Tackle Your To-Do List

To-do lists are a great way to keep you focused and on target. Schedule a short block at the end of the day to go through your list, check off what’s been done, and add tasks for the next day. But don’t beat yourself up if you haven’t finished everything. Simply move incomplete items to tomorrow.

You can save even more time with a to-do list app. Check out this top 10 list from PCWorld, most are free.

Don’t Multitask

For a long time, multitasking was touted as a highly productive strategy for any busy professional. However, it’s been shown that most people can’t fully concentrate on more than one task at a time. In fact, the University of London’s Institute of Psychiatry found that when you’re drowning in texts, emails and phone calls, your IQ drops ten points.

By concentrating on just one task at a time, you’ll ensure that it’s finished correctly and save yourself the trouble and time of redoing it later.

Schedule Tough Stuff During Your High Energy Time

When are you at your best? Do you power through tasks in the morning and slow down after lunch, or does it take you a while to get up to full steam? Identify your most productive time of the day, and tackle your big, complicated items then.

Though it’s tempting to handle the fun, easy things when you’re feeling productive, try to resist. You’ll feel better and save tons of time when you get through the difficult tasks while you’re operating at full capacity.

Make Sure You Punch Out Every Day

It’s important that your business day has an actual end – the point where you disconnect completely by shutting off the computer, putting the mobile devices away and relaxing. While you may have times when quitting isn’t an option, you should strive to leave the office behind for the day as often as possible. Ask yourself whether what’s keeping you working is truly an emergency, or if it can be moved to the next day’s to-do list.

When you commit to developing time saving habits for your small business, you’ll end up happier, more relaxed and more productive than ever.

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Big corporations have the luxury of dangling premium benefit packages to snag top talent, while smaller companies have to make do with low budget programs that don’t come with nearly as many perks.

This makes finding quality employees much harder.

The good news is, today’s employees aren’t necessarily looking for corporate level health and retirement packages. There are other ways to make your company a great place to work.

You don’t have to spend a fortune to provide these unique employee benefits that people love.

4 Fun and Free Employee Benefits

Get Flexible

Flexible work schedules are the golden ticket of employee benefits. Allowing your employees to occasionally come in late, leave early or take a few hours in the middle of the day for things like doctor’s appointments, family issues and 9-to-5 errands makes their lives easier. It also strengthens their company loyalty.

You can also extend flexibility and a refreshing change of pace by offering work-from-home days.

However you decide to use it, flextime is free for you and a fantastic benefit for your most valuable employees, and helps give your small business a competitive edge.

Chill Out

Stress is an inevitable part of business life. If you can offer your employees opportunities to relax during the workday, you’ll earn their appreciation in a big way.

Here are a few ideas:

• Designate an empty office or unused room as a “Zen center.” Add a few comfortable chairs, a couch and/or meditation mats and let employees take short stress breaks. They can power nap, meditate or just sit in peace and quiet for a few minutes.
• Hire a masseuse to come in for the day and give out free massages.
• Offer free or discounted yoga classes. Local practitioners may extend discounted rates if the whole office signs up.

Go Shoeless

There’s nothing better than getting home from a long day at work and finally kicking off your shoes – unless you’ve spent the day in a shoeless office. Creating a shoe-free environment for your employees can encourage them to feel comfortable and at home all day. Unless you’re working with heavy machinery, of course.

Oh, and you should probably have employees slip back into their shoes when clients come in.

Stand Up and Cheer

Your employees enjoy recognition for a job well done, and the rewards don’t have to be monetary or even material. Getting the whole team in on the appreciation – by having a round of applause for employees with big accomplishments, perhaps – is a simple and fun way to recognize hard work.

Of course, the easiest and most underused way to show recognition and appreciation for your employees’ work is to simply say, “Thank you.” Make those two little words part of your daily vocabulary and you’ll notice a positive upswing in your work environment.

What unique employee benefits do you offer?

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