The use of data-driven strategies has grown to play an essential role in the success of modern marketing plans. Nowadays, the use of big data—which refers to massive structured or unstructured datasets—is the basis of most marketing decisions. Companies leverage big data to gain insights, inform strategies, and ultimately boost revenue.
What is Big Data?
Big data underpins most of the processes and operations undertaken in an organization. As the name suggests, it covers incredibly large sets of structured and unstructured data. This data can come in numerous shapes and forms, such as previously collected customer records, current website data, or even social media interactions. With big data, marketers can understand target audiences better, design more effective campaigns, and optimize product offerings.
The Rise of Big Data
Originally, big data was synonymously linked with technology, however, with the rise of digitalization and cloud technologies in the past few years, marketers soon got in on the action. As big data analysis tools become more sophisticated, companies have been able to collect, store, and subsequently analyze ever-increasing quantities of data. With the power to make decisions more accurately, marketers armed with big data have been able to craft successful strategies and win over customers with more targeted messaging.
Big Data Technologies
In order to make sense of the enormous amounts of data being collected, marketers have access to a range of powerful big data technologies. This includes:
- Data lakes, which are used to store data in its native format, and drawn upon for analytics projects.
- Data mining, in which software is used to uncover patterns in big datasets.
- Statistical analytics, data analysis techniques that organizations use to analyze their data and create reports.
- Data visualization techniques, which are used to present the data in an understandable and actionable format.
Big Data for Marketing
As the marketing trend shifts from broadcasting to outreach, leveraging big data for marketing is becoming essential. With access to more accurate data and enhanced analytics tools, marketers are able to formulate effective data- and analytics-driven strategies. By understanding customer buying or usage habits, or even anticipating potential trends, companies can gain better insights and make data-driven decisions to maximize customer satisfaction and increase sales.
Benefits of Leveraging Big Data for Marketing
Companies that unlock the potential of big data will be ready to benefit from the following advantages in their marketing efforts:
- Better targeting of potential customers: A sound understanding of customer profile data, customer interests, and purchase intentions enables marketers to target the right customers with the right messages.
- More accurate customer segmentation: Leveraging data helps companies to identify and segment their customer base. This enables targeted campaigns with more targeted offers.
- Improved optimization of marketing campaigns: Marketers can use data to identify their most profitable segments, optimize campaigns accordingly, and produce higher ROI.
- Greater customer engagement: Accurate customer segmentation helps marketers engage the right customers with personalized promotions and messages.
Examples of Big Data in Marketing
A few examples of how data-driven strategies are currently being used in marketing include:
- Predictive analytics: This involves leveraging historical data to anticipate customer behavior and determine optimal strategies or tactics to reach desired outcomes.
- Sentiment analysis: There are tools available to analyze customer reviews, website visits, and social media interactions to gain insights into customer's attitude.
- Data analysis: Data analysis can be used to answer questions, such as: how long it takes to convert a customer and what are the customer responses to marketing messages.
How to Leverage Big Data for Marketing
So how does one get started with harnessing big data for marketing success? The key is to start small and focus on the basics.
Start Small
Start by focusing on the basics and work your way up. Define the objectives of your marketing plan, identify the key data points you need, survey your stakeholders, and sort the data. Make sure that the data is accurate and reliable by cleaning it up, validating it, and standardizing it. This is the most important step to ensure that data-driven decisions deliver tangible results.
Hire Expert Help
If you don't have the required expertise in-house, you can hire external help. Expert data engineers can provide you with the necessary help to make sense of the data. They can also point out inaccuracies, draw correlations, and identify patterns in the large volume of data.
Integrate and Analyze
Once you have the data cleaned, filtered and analyzed, you can start to integrate it into your marketing plan. Make sure that you insert metrics and measures that are aligned to the objectives of your marketing plan so that you can track the effectiveness of your campaigns. Analyze the data regularly to gain insights that can help you optimize campaigns and strategies on an ongoing basis.
By leveraging big data, companies are able to make smarter and more informed decisions in their marketing plans. With access to sophisticated data-analysis tools, marketers can uncover new customer segments and create more effective strategies to reach wider audiences. As a result, companies can increase their market share, boost sales, and ultimately gain an edge on their competitors.