Starting your own business can be frightening. There is so much to deal with as an entrepreneur; budgets, allotment of human resources, finances and many more. However, you would never want to falter at any step because running your business smoothly and seeing it grow is the ultimate deal. Every business runs in a dynamic environment and every entrepreneur is vulnerable to making mistakes, but one can curtail such incidences using one of the most important things today – Data!
According to IDC’s report, worldwide data will reach 175 zettabytes by 2025. What do these numbers mean for business owners? It means that an enormous amount of data is available to you about your customers, and you can amp up your sales, brand presence and more using it.
Data Science helps businesses collect and comprehend massive amounts of data from several sources and gain critical insights to make better data-driven decisions for the company.
What is Data Science?
Data science is extracting unfiltered data and filtering it to find hidden patterns to get actionable insights. These insights help deploy effective marketing and sales techniques to grow the customer base and expand businesses.
As Caitlin Smallwood perfectly summed the success of a business by saying
“The data speaks for itself; that’s the easiest measure of success.”
So, Why Does Every Startup Need a Data Science Department?
It’s a common misconception that data science is only essential for a tech company. It can be used in any domain or industry. Some remarkable things a business can do by leveraging the power of data science in different fields are:
1. Increase E-commerce
Data is used to track consumer buying behaviours in an e-commerce company. For example, it follows consumers’ average cart value, the type of goods they purchase, the size they usually order, and their frequency of recommending products in the future. Data scientists can also use the insights drawn to send gentle reminders to customers if they have left items in their cart for longer than usual. You can increase your online sales by setting up a data team in your company.
2. Improved Logistics of a Company
Data science can be the biggest boon to improving a company’s logistics. It improves operational efficiency, forecasting correctly to a remarkable extent, increasing customer satisfaction and route optimization.
Route optimization essentially means tracking a vehicle and its information like the time taken to reach the destination, the route taken, points of delay etc. This information is used to assess the best route and time of departure to reach the destination in as little time as possible.
3. Better Digital Marketing Campaigns
Digital marketing campaigns utilise data and data insights from the data science department to drive successful online campaigns. For example, to keep track of frequent purchasers online by the consumer. In addition, it helps send emails and newsletters regarding new deals and deploy customer retention strategies. Apart from this, data science can do wonders with SEO optimisation and even sentiment analysis of consumers. Thus, helping create effective, timely campaigns that drive results.
4. Data Science Helps Improve Healthcare
Data science in healthcare is beneficial in helping doctors identify deformities using the images obtained through X-ray, CT scan, MRI and ECG. Image processing through deep learning technologies like support vector machines have brought about tremendous advancement in diagnosis in particular.
5. Effective Finance Tracking
Data science has revolutionised the finance landscape by presenting data points that help assess risk analysis. It uses predictive modelling and forecasting, mathematical analysis for data interpretation, and hypothesis testing to track the volatility of financial markets. Businesses can now even study their sales trends by analysing their financial data. Therefore, having a data science department in your company will help you keep track of your finances and gather insights about improving them.
Data science aids in data visualisation so that corporate stakeholders may construct future vision statements and trajectories. Data Science implementation for organisations is now a need for every company trying to expand. That is why the need of the hour for every business, especially a startup, is to have a strong data science department.