Data has become essential to running businesses, organizations, societies, and governments.

But in the same breath, it can become a menace without a proper way to organize and structure it.

A lot of data flows in from all angles, including client-facing teams, accounting, human resource, and sales teams, into a business, leading to significant accumulations that can get hard to manage.

Therefore, the arrival of the concept of big data into the mix has brought significant relief. 

It has changed how businesses make important decisions. With big data, companies can collect, organize, store, and report more accurately using large data volumes.

Business owners and managers can then use these reports to gain insights and discover patterns that help decision-making.

Statistics have shown businesses of all sizes are investing in big data applications to get better insights and forecast ways to improve service delivery and grow sales and profits.

Look at a few industry examples of how big data is applied.

Uses And Applications Of Big Data

Technology and big data consulting services providers have enabled the proper utilization of data and opened up its potential across all industries.

Using big data insights, businesses and organizations are making better and more strategic decisions toward business growth. Here are the four best industry use cases of big data.

Education Industry

The global population is growing, and so are the students enrolling daily.

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Similarly, the type of education models being offered is growing to match the trends and needs of the current world.

That means this industry collects a massive amount of data related to the students, courses, results, departments, and many others.

While traditionally, this data was gathered only at an institutional level, it’s now accessible and can be gathered from different sources.

Big data helps to analyze data and provide insights into how learning institutions can improve efficiency across all functions.

Here are some ways big data has motivated changes in the education industry.

Career Predictions

In analyzing a student’s learning history, educators can now help guide an individual to the best career choice based on their grades, capabilities, interests, and strengths.

Improved Grading Systems

Institutions can improve at grading and scoring students based on more than a result slip.

Customized Learning Programs

Curating learning programs to fit individuals instead of the previous general focus or one size fits all systems.

Updating Course Material

Appropriately updating course material to what is more relevant and helpful to students.

Banking And Financial Services

Banking and financial services are regarded as data-intensive industries. They are constantly collecting data for creating customer profiles, various accounts a customer holds, and transactions.

Big data and data science applications in finance can help the financial and banking industry to store data more efficiently and avoid silos that result in duplication, redundancies, and overlapping.

Big data also helps this industry to evade financial fraud and money laundering incidents through Know Your Customer (KYC) data collected and consolidated for easy access.

Banks can detect early signs of fraud through recorded data patterns and identify high-risk customers before giving loans and mortgages.

Additionally, the industry can use big data to get greater insights into their customers and provide better, personalized services that make them more profitable.

These are some of the benefits of big data in banking and finance:

  • Detecting and preventing financial fraud
  • Better customer engagement
  • Better customer profiling and financial risk management
  • Providing data-driven products and services
  • Higher customer engagement
  • Better market analysis
  • Higher customer insights for personalized services

Advertising And Marketing

The marketing industry is vast and highly beneficial to businesses looking for visibility, recognition, reaching new audiences, or introducing new products to the market.

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However, a marketing strategy is only as effective as the data it is based on. Traditional marketing involved surveys or personal interactions with an audience.

Businesses would place ads anywhere, hoping the right audience would see and buy into their offering.

It was challenging to track the real impact of the influence of those ads.

The internet introduced a similar form of digital marketing. However, there’s much more to rely on in the form of data available to know exactly where to target for better marketing results.

With big data, you have access to a large data pool to analyze and understand exactly where to focus your marketing efforts for a higher impact.

Data analytics can help you run better campaigns to increase visibility and traffic by placing the relevant ads to the right audience.

You also get insights on improving products or services, engaging customers, and using the best platforms for better conversions and sales.

For example, an international eCommerce company can collect and analyze data to help target different regions according to their purchase patterns and derive better results from their campaigns.

Transport And Logistics

Big data use cases help improve efficiency and remove chaos in the transport and logistics sector. Some of the best improvements brought about by big data include the following:

Traffic and congestion control: Big data can help estimate when a particular road section will most likely get congestion and route the traffic appropriately.

For example, traffic checkers can collect data from cab-hailing apps or people searching for routes on google maps.

This can help redirect other road users to less-used routes and evade traffic congestion.

Route planning: Logistic companies can use big data to plan customer delivery routes more appropriately to save time and money.

Improved road safety: Predictive analysis using big data can help improve road safety by helping to identify accident-prone areas and the signs that lead up to these incidents and act accordingly.

Takeaway

As you can see above, big data applications are practical for everyday use in business, and the diversity of the examples above can show.

Big data is significantly transforming how a business operates by using better insights and making predictions more accurate.

If you want to run your business competitively, you need to pay attention to the impact of big data on the business landscape now and in the future.

This technology will likely keep evolving and bringing new transformations, and it’s best if you are not left behind.

Get on board by consulting big data companies to see how best you can benefit and grow your business or organization.