What Does The External Advanced-Data Revolution Mean For Enterprises?

    Big Data is currently on track to hit global revenue of $119 billion by 2025. This success is mainly driven by enterprises turning to external datasets to give advantages to their business. Huge companies from around the globe are already using external data to streamline their services, with Netflix having reportedly saved over $1 billion through improved customer retention based on external data analysis.

    Netflix isn’t the only one currently benefiting, with a business that uses big data increasing their profits, on average, by 9%. In this digital age of accessible data everywhere, more and more enterprises are turning to external data to set themselves up for success.

    In this article, we’ll explore the different types of data and demonstrate how organizations can start to use external data within their structures, helping boost profit, increase customer retention, and stay ahead of market trends.

    What types of business data are there?

    Typically, the types of data that a business will encounter in their life cycles can be split into four different categories. Each category is a blend of two formats, data always being either traditional or advanced. 

    Traditional data is structured data, something almost all businesses will deal with. This could be their data within a centralized system, with their in-house data engineers and scientists maintaining the quality of the data.

    On the other hand, advanced data, or ‘Big Data’, refers to massive datasets that would be far too difficult to manage in the same way that in-house, traditional data is processed. Typically, any data from a vast dataset will fit into this category. 

    Additionally, unlike traditional data, this form can be structured or unstructured, with even semi-structured data being seen from time to time. 

    By pairing these systems, four common data types come about: 

    • Traditional internal – Any commonplace business practice will produce traditional internal data. For example, any metrics that your business generates, like sales or customer satisfaction rates, fits into this category. Typically, these datasets will be used to improve a process or keep a business in order. A customer support department could examine traditional internal data to determine if one message strategy is more valuable than another. 
    • Traditional external – Traditional external data can also be understood as market data. Anything provided by large external business organizations or governmental systems will fall into this category. For example, a business would check the U.S. Bureau of Statistics to see public traditional external data about their field, its growth projections, and any other market concepts they want information about. This is also a helpful data pool. It gives information about trends that are currently impacting the market, helping businesses stay in line with what’s happening in their wider industry. The key thing to remember about this traditional form of data is that it is already structured, allowing businesses to draw insight instantly. 
    • Advanced internal – Data that fits into this category is anything produced by a customer interacting with a businesses’ services. For example, as they move through the sales funnel, data is made about their customer journey. While this data can become very useful for refining how businesses operate on their customer-facing side, it is often overlooked and left unprocessed. Any data produced in this sector will most commonly come from an organization’s website, application, or client-recording logs.
    • Advanced external – Finally, we come on to perhaps the most essential resource that businesses can turn to, a data set commonly overlooked by organizations. Advanced external data is datasets delivered to a business through an on-demand data service, sometimes called Data-as-a-Service (DaaS). These datasets will contain many unstructured sources, giving practically anything to do with the industry. This data can be used to track competitors, follow supplier information, get information about public opinions on specific brands and products, and even harvest public data from social media. It is the most expansive form of data and one that your business should be taking advantage of. 

    Now we understand the four different types of data and how they can benefit your business, let’s focus on the untapped gem of advanced external data in more detail.

    How does a business get access to advanced external data?

    External data has nothing to do with a company, more often reflecting a particular industry or general public sentiment. It isn’t directly available to a business. Instead of this, they have to turn to other solutions:

    • Buy Data From DaaS businesses
    • Establish Your External-Data Sourcing Team

    Let’s explore these options.

    DaaS businesses

    While a DaaS business will deliver the insights that you’re looking for, this is often one of the most expensive ways of getting advanced external. As you’re hiring a service, the time spent gathering the data will cost you money, as will the collation and presentation stages. Due to this, although it is perhaps the fastest way of getting information, it is slightly more costly than other methods. 

    There are currently DaaS services that will process data at a fraction of the cost; however, these are harder to come by. 

    Building your own

    If your business decides to build its data pipeline using an ETL model (extract, transform, and load), it will have to use a delta lake, a location where it can store all of the raw data they collect and create. By doing this, your business will be able to preserve extensive detail, the raw data being in a form that is then perfect for collation and analysis.

    Additionally, this method allows your team to turn data into something consistent, the delta lake ensuring that internal regulatory requirements are met and that any data that enters the platform is cleansed before your analysts access it.

    The biggest downside to this is that assembling a whole team that you then pay annual salaries can quickly end up being much more than just hiring a DaaS service. Especially if you’re not making the most of the insights, this could be a misstep for your business.

    The right pathway of accessing advanced external data will change depending on what your business needs, lasting solutions, or rapid results. We recommend you start with DaaS services, as these will allow you to test out these insights and see how effective they are for your business. 

    How does external data help enterprises?

    As stated, external data will pull from a vast range of sources, collecting unstructured data from all corners of the internet. This data is an extensive pool of information, from combing through eCommerce platforms for reviews and looking at purchase receipts to moving through the millions of posts that people produce during their average 142 minutes on social media a day.

    Due to the diversity of data sources, depending on your industry, you’ll be able to apply your data in innovative ways that can help push your business towards success.

    Typically, a business that engages with advanced external data can expect a range of benefits from turning to external data. Let’s take a look at three of these core advantages:

    • Identify trends – As external data can move through social media and global search history volumes, it can pinpoint new trends right as they’re beginning to rise. Due to this, you’ll be able to adapt your marketing ahead of time, producing products that fit in with the trend and ensuring that your marketing style blends in with what’s just around the corner.
    • Product improvement – With access to transaction recipes, sales volumes, and eCommerce reviews across millions of sites, external data can demonstrate which products are currently selling well around the globe. With this knowledge, you’ll be able to define what your company offers, ensuring that you have a product that will always go down well with your audience and the whole industry looking for a suitable product.
    • Forecast segment growth – Segmentation and user categorization are powerful tools that allow businesses to market to particular demographics more accurately. External data takes this to the next level, allowing businesses to see which demographics are turning to specific industries, which are growing, and currently shrinking. With this knowledge, they’ll change their marketing to personalize to this expanding audience, ensuring that their resources are more efficiently spent. 

    When an enterprise makes the most of external data, it can gain market insight across millions of different data points. Processing this unstructured data into usable insights, your business will be able to capitalize on the internet’s constant data production and push your organization into a new era of success. 

    Final thoughts

    Data is a potent tool for businesses, with advanced external data only further extending the capacity of what data can do for your business. By engaging with all of the data sources that your organization has access to, you’ll be able to use insights to make more informed decisions. 

    With this change, you’ll be putting your business on a data-driven pathway to success, boosting your product value, forecasting future growth, and always staying one step ahead of market trends.



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