Data Strategy for Small Business

Written By Sean Mcclain

Smaller businesses should approach data strategy with a focus on practicality, scalability, and impact. Unlike enterprises with massive data teams and budgets, smaller businesses need to be lean and targeted in how they collect, store, and use data. 

Companies without full-blown data teams and seven-figure marketing budgets cannot afford to waste time and money on data strategies that don't provide more immediate results. 

Below is a list of key ideas to focus on if you are responsible for managing data at a small business:

1. Start with Business Goals, Not Data

  • Identify key business questions: What do you need data to help with? Customer retention? More efficient marketing? Inventory management?

  • Focus on outcomes: Instead of collecting data for the sake of it, define the actions you’ll take based on insights.

2. Prioritize Essential Data Sources

  • Customer Data (CRM, website, transactions) - Helps personalize marketing & improve customer experience.

  • Operational Data (inventory, sales trends) - Helps optimize resources & reduce waste.

  • Marketing Data (campaign performance, attribution) - Helps understand ROI and optimize spend.

3. Leverage Simple, Cost-Effective Tools

  • Google Analytics / Looker Studio for website and campaign tracking.

  • CRM systems like Salesforce, HubSpot, or Zoho for customer insights.

  • Low-code or no-code automation (Airbyte, Zapier, Make) to sync data without heavy IT investment.

  • Cloud storage (Google Drive, Dropbox, or S3) instead of complex data warehouses.

4. Use AI and Automation Wisely

  • Focus on ROI with AI: Use tools like ChatGPT, Google Vertex AI, or BigQuery ML selectively, focusing investments on capability and capacity expansion for internal operations over expensive models that analyze data with no measurable outcomes.

  • Automate reports & dashboards: Save time by scheduling recurring reports with visualization tools.

5. Build a Scalable Foundation

  • Use cloud-based solutions that grow with your business and scale as you scale.

  • Avoid data silos by ensuring key tools integrate and are supported long-term.

  • Keep compliance in mind (GDPR, CCPA) if handling customer data. Data breaches happen everywhere and a violation can be crippling for a small business.

Use Case

At Lakefront, one of our clients requested that we incorporate over 20 marketing-related data sources into a new data warehouse that we were setting up for them to automate and centralize their marketing performance reports.

After looking through the actual platforms, we noticed that ten of these sources were not being leveraged actively by their marketing team. After some discussions we were able to build a roadmap to integrate several of these sources into our warehouse solution but not until they worked to develop their marketing processes around these tools to ensure the data we would be ingesting and modeling was relevant. 

Roughly 3 - 4 of these source platforms were dropped by the company after our discovery and subsequent review when the head of marketing realized how little they were being leveraged by his team.

Final Thought

Smaller businesses don’t need a full-blown Customer Data Platform (CDP) on day one, but they should think in a CDP mindset, aggregating useful data in one place, analyzing it effectively, and taking action that drives business results.

Sean Mcclain
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Customer Data Platforms 101