The days where marketing decisions are based on experience and intuition are long gone. Organizations that use data to make decisions are the ones that are set up for success. But any old data won’t cut it, and poor data use costs the US economy $3 trillion annually. You don’t want your business to be part of this statistic!
In today’s digital world, successful businesses are data-driven and make key decisions by incorporating big data into their processes. 97 percent of businesses are investing in big data, and understanding how these companies are able to catapult their business to success through big data is key to knowing how to position your business for growth as well.
What is big data analysis?
Big data analysis refers to the management and information extrapolation of the large amounts of structured and unstructured data that businesses accumulate on a daily basis. More than the data itself, what matters most to businesses is how they put it to use.
Big data is characterized by three elements: volume, velocity, and variety.
- Volume: the large amounts of data that is received and processed
- Velocity: the speed at which data is accumulated
- Variety: The different types of data that an organization has to work with on a day to day basis
Compared to traditional databases, big data concentrates on data processing and analysis with minimal to zero latency across the board. With the number of devices and platforms increasing by the day, data is being accumulated from various sources like social media, mobile devices, Internet of Things (IoT), websites and more.
Big data offers businesses the advantage of benefiting from valuable insights that can fuel quicker decision making and predict future process outcomes. From healthcare, financial institutions, and manufacturing to education, IT, retail, and transportation, big data analytics has penetrated almost every industry.
Let’s take a look at how one of the major ride-sharing services uses big data to cater to its customers. Uber uses customer data to track and recognize the most preferred services by its customers, the service usage time, and its routes to understand its demand and supply curve, and price fares dynamically.
Businesses need to look for channels to collect customer and process data consistently. But more importantly, they need to understand how they process the information and put it to use as this is what will decide its growth. Partnering with a data analytics agency will help you understand various touch points of raw data that you can process, analyze, and deploy in your overall business strategy to put you ahead of the competition.
How to use big data to improve your marketing
For improved customer acquisition
Clients are the lifelines of businesses across the world, which is why you must invest heavily into acquiring new customers. One of the main reasons that businesses fail to beat their competition is because they don’t understand their customers.
Big data helps businesses capture customer data in real time and understand patterns and trends, enabling them to create groundbreaking products for their customers that are tailored to their needs.
69 percent of companies are reaching new thresholds in terms of customer analysis and acquisition by integrating big data in their processes. Initiating a data-driven culture has allowed these companies to decrease their expenses by 49 percent and opened up new channels for innovation and disruption.
Figure 1: Big data initiatives and success rate. Source: Software Strategies Blog
Using this accumulated data companies can transform customer insights into increased customer engagement, enabling them to be more market savvy, attract new customers, and increase their revenue over time.
To specifically target your campaigns
To make your marketing campaigns a success, you need to amplify your reach to your target market. To achieve these results, businesses need to have accurate, high quality, and timely data. This is where big data comes into play, giving you a real time accurate picture of your target audience.
Here are a few types of data that you can use to specifically target your audience:
- Social engagement
- Demographic
- Psychographic
- Third party behavioral
- Conversion
- Geographic
With such high quality data at your disposal, you can micro segment your customers and reach out to each of those segments by running concentrated marketing campaigns using information from all advertising channels including social media, websites, landing pages, emails, and blogs.
Unlike traditional data collection methods, big data enables companies to understand customers at an individual level. From collecting customers’ demographics and geographical location to preferences, dislikes, and more at a microscopic level, businesses can ensure that their data is rich and their campaigns use personalized targeting to achieve the desired results.
After all, the better you understand your customers, the better you can reach them and drive your conversions. Big data is an effective tool for businesses to gather high quality data, gain customer insights. By doing so, your business draws greater benefits by increasing your marketing campaigns value.
To improve your content
Content is one of the crucial elements of an effective marketing strategy. Big data has a major influence on content marketing, and is essential if you want to connect with your audience effectively. Marketers are now equipped to strategize and customize their content better as they are exposed to relatively large datasets.
The main purpose of content marketing is creating content that your audience wants to see.
Big data helps marketers to gain insights into specific details including the platforms that their audience segments prefer to use, how long they engage with your content, the type of content they like the most, and more.
With this information, marketers can present high quality customized content to their potential customers and reach out to them on the right platforms to gain more visibility. By incorporating big data, companies can create more informed customer experiences that helps them achieve their marketing goals.
If tracking your target audience and identifying their content interests is quite a task, teaming up with a big data analytics services provider can help your business to create and execute excellent data-driven content marketing strategies that yields the results you want.
To make AI and automation a part of your marketing strategy
To make highly targeted marketing campaigns a success, marketers need valuable information that gives them a clear picture of their prospective customers. As we are dealing with large volumes of data, it is not easy to process it all in one go.
This is where machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) comes into play. Machine learning, a field of AI, applies complex algorithms to big data to uncover patterns and gain useful insights by providing interactive charts and dashboards to marketers. For this reason, AI is the future of marketing as it helps you delve deeper into raw data and analyze it better, to create targeted ad campaigns.
In addition to AI, incorporating workflow automation in your routine will help you expedite your business processes. Big data workflows contain multiple steps incorporating various technologies that are all done in real time.
With workflow automation, you can increase your project’s scalability, productivity, mitigate potential risks, and minimize any gaps or service interruptions that makes your data process more reliable. This is why big brands have been successful and making a mark in their respective industries.
To test, track and optimize better
When you combine data-driven processes with A/B testing you have a much more effective way to test your marketing than just performing A/B testing by itself. With the right datasets from big data processes at your disposal, your team of data scientists can identify the processes that perform the best, avoid the ones that don’t give the desired outputs, and help you invest in profitable campaigns.
Let’s say you’re testing your new website design and want to see which design performs better to boost your conversions. By using the combined power of big data and A/B testing, you can find out how long customers spend on those two different website designs, and find the number of users that complete transactions for each.
Upon receiving the results from the analysis, you can deploy the best design and optimize your website to boost your business performance. From banner clicks, emails, and sign-ups to engagement rates on social media, and calls to action (CTAs), you can track, test, and optimize all your business processes effectively with big data better.
Become the master of data
Data is your ticket to audience insights, interests, behaviors and more! This information can help you turn your marketing strategy into one that is able to deliver the right message in the right place at the right time quickly and efficiently – presenting you as a business that truly cares about its customers. Don’t let these opportunities escape you! Learn more in Data and Web Analytics: The Complete Marketer’s Manual.
If you’re wanting to enhance your brand’s decision making and understand how to move customers through the marketing funnel, big data analytics is key. But deploying big data analytics in your business processes can be challenging if you haven’t got the experience.
This is why partnering with an established big data analytics services provider is a smart move for your business. Growth Marketing Genie has a team of robust data analytics professionals that can help your business flourish. To learn more about how we can help you, contact us today!
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