Big Data

5 ways Big Data can add to Digital Marketing

Published

on

Long gone are the days when marketing success would be heavily dependent on subjectivity, intuition and huge promotion budgets pushing out marketing messages in your face at all possible touch points. It is a completely different ball game today, and it wouldn’t be wrong to say that marketing as a whole has evolved towards being a completely customer-centric and data-driven activity today; and the most effective strategies, irrespective of industry verticals, aim to deliver personalized customer experiences. As a component of marketing, Advertising has also evolved and now, Data plays a crucial role in planning overall Ad-Campaigns. This has been possible only due to the advent of big data, to gain valuable insights into customer preferences.

So, what really is big data?

Most organizations today have systems in place to capture and store massive data points from their all their customer interactions from research, sales and marketing. This data can be structured, semi structured or unstructured and will likely continue to increase in size. It can get overwhelming to make sense of this increasingly dynamic information. Big data is a means to analyze and extract valuable information from these complex and interlinked sets of data, and observe patterns that can help guide decision making.

Put simply, big data is a means of processing large volumes of complex data sets to derive actionable insights and Data Analytics refers to the process of analyzing the raw data and finding out conclusions about that information. Given the importance of data in marketing, it is equally important to understand the role of data analytics in marketing. Given that the world is going digital, there is already much rich data available from earlier marketing activities, consumer behavior tracking, other databases and research, and it is now possible to paint an accurate picture for almost every consumer and create predictive models for future interactions. This could be used throughout the sales funnel, right from identifying the right consumer, to product design, marketing communication, demand forecasting as well as customer retention.

How can integrating big data into your digital marketing efforts help?

In today’s fragmented marketing landscape, one of the biggest challenges that marketers face is to engage with the right consumers at the right time with the right message. Here is where big data comes in – big data can not only help us understand customers better, it can also help us develop better strategies that are sure to give your business a competitive edge.

Being able to understand and predict consumer behavior accurately using various data based insights can indeed open up a whole new world of opportunities.  Here are some of the ways you could use big data to bolster your digital marketing efforts:

  1. Data Visualization

Big Data makes it possible to make sense of the data, helping marketers recognize patterns, trends and problems, using different types of visual representation. This provides an easier way to understand what the data wants to say, and the different ways in which the data can be interlinked to mine new insights. Think of your social media analytics charts, or even the charts that you can find in Google Analytics, both of which are great examples of big data visualization.

  • Consumer Insights

One of the key ways organizations can stay ahead of competition is by mining accurate consumer insights, and leveraging them in their business and marketing strategy. Why settle for ambiguous demographic and psychographic segmentation when you can get richer data for each of your consumers? Data such as what your consumer likes and what products he prefers, what he thinks about your company and preferred distribution channels or modes of interaction, repurchase patterns and more, can help you paint an accurate picture about consumer sentiments, and tweak your marketing initiatives accordingly.

  • Predictive Analytics

Historical consumer data and current data can be combined to make fairly accurate predictions about their future behavior. For instance, which product are they more likely to buy and when, how much will they spend, which payment mode they will most likely use and so on. This could help you with forecasting demand for a specific product model in advance. You could also predict beforehand how your campaign might perform given certain parameters, or even when the demand curve for your product could go up or down. It is almost like having a looking glass into the future, which can help you segment and target your consumer groups accordingly, and design marketing initiatives that would better resonate with each segment.

  • Customize Consumer Interactions

Once you are able to access latent consumer insights, it will also be possible to create customized online interactions with almost any consumer, based on data from your past interactions with them. Not only will this increase relevance, it will also likely increase engagement and ROI as well. Product recommendations from ecommerce sites, video recommendations on YouTube and Netflix are a case in point. This doesn’t stop at product recommendations. You could even customize your marketing communication in real time, based on past consumer interactions. For instance, you could send personalized emails or text messages based on their past purchases, life cycle stage, demographics and their internet search history, how they have spent their time on your website or mobile app and for that matter, even their response to your past marketing campaigns.

  • Budget optimization

A thorough knowledge about whom to target, when to interact, what to say and where to say will make it easier to allocate your marketing budgets more effectively, and focus them on initiatives or consumer segments which are more likely to give you the results you want. This, when combined with data from which of your digital marketing channels are giving you higher CTRs and conversions is a recipe for success. Needless to say, this will also help to prevent budget spillage into areas by casting your marketing net too wide, or in the wrong sea! As you continue to use big data along with AI & ML, you will only get better at optimizing your marketing spends to a point where you will even be able to predict the results you can expect.

  • Campaign Evaluation

With specific metrics for each of your multiple campaigns, it will become much easier to measure campaign performance. Unlike the days of yore when it wasn’t possible to accurately attribute campaign results, big data visualization can help one see precisely the ROI on each campaign, including but not limited to increase in sales, how each channel has contributed and even changes in consumer sentiment. This can be used as a blueprint to plan your future marketing campaigns.

As we would all agree, big data is transforming how marketing is done today, as it takes the guesswork out of what digital marketing initiatives will work. I would go on to say that the contribution of big data can only be limited by our imagination, because from where we stand today, the possibilities are truly endless.

Trending

Exit mobile version