Data is currency in this digital marketing era. Data is what guides the strategic efforts within a company as it helps marketers understand their target audience in order to create more personalized campaigns. Although the process of collecting and sorting data for analysis is not new to anyone, Big Data has only gained importance in the last decade as the world shifted to a more digital environment.
As a marketer in the modern world, it is important to understand what Big Data is and how it can help you optimize your efforts and maximize ROI.
What is big data?
Big data is the large volume of structured and unstructured information that gets flooded into a company on a daily basis. The importance of big data is not the amount of information a company receives but rather how they choose to organize the data to understand the actions, needs, wants, and buying habits of their consumers.
Big Data can be classified as Volume, Velocity, Variety, and lastly Veracity.
Volume
Volume refers to the large amount of data that can be collected from a variety of different sources. These sources would include social media, online forms, online transactions, and machine-to-machine data. The number of consumer characteristics has grown immensely causing the volume of structured and unstructured data to outgrown the capacity and techniques of traditional methods. New technologies have helped clear this burden by making this data easy to process and sort.
Velocity
Velocity is referred to as the speed at the content is generated, stored, analyzed, and archived. Companies need to ensure that appropriate procedures are in place to deal with the inflow of data in a timely manner.
Variety
Variety refers to as the different forms of data that a company receives. The data comes from different sources and so it will be constructed differently. The data can be structured or unstructured, can come from various sources, and lastly can come in various formats (videos, written documents, images, etc).
Veracity
Veracity refers to the discrepancies and noise in the data. The data needs to be meaningful to the points being analyzed. Part of a data strategy is to ensure that your company is not storing any irrelevant data that can hinder your progress.
How Does Big Data Influence Digital Marketing
Big Data becomes a crucial part of marketing as it provides marketers with the insights they need to understand the actions of their consumers. As mentioned above the key is to be able to organize the data to help segment the market and create a consumer persona based on characteristics such as behaviours, purchase patterns, hobbies, geolocation, and much more.
This becomes a more effective way of marketing as you eliminate all the guesswork!
Here are six ways in which big data benefits your digital marketing efforts:
1. Consumer Insights
In this day and age, marketing has become the ability of a company to interpret the data and change its strategies accordingly. Big Data allows for real-time consumer insights which is crucial to understanding the habits of your customers. By interacting with your consumers through social media you will know exactly what they want and expect from your product or service, which will be key to distinguishing your campaign from your competitors.
2. Personalisation
Personalization has become a must! As mentioned above, consumer insights will help you understand your consumers by helping you create more targeted and personalized campaigns.
It’s all about delivering the right message at the right time! Examples of personalisation would be through targeted email and targeted ads.
Targeted Email
Targeted emails will help you create a stronger bond with your consumer. Using email marketing you can create more personalised and effective campaigns by delivering the right message. You can target these emails through browsing history, behaviours, purchasing history, and much more.
Targeted Ads
Information from big data will help you create more effective targeted ads. Companies looking to market online will use third party sources to display ads to users. This in turn helps increase brand awareness, revenue through increased sales and lastly, increased brand loyalty.
3. Help Increase Sales
Big data will help with demand predictions for a product or service. Information gathered on user behaviour will allow marketers to answer what types of product their users are buying, how often they conduct purchases or search for a product or service and lastly, what payment methods they prefer using.
It is very unlikely that every person that visits your website will make a purchase and so having answers to the questions above helps create a more seamless user experience and allows marketers to identify and target their users’ pain points.
4. Campaign Efficiency And Budget Optimisation
Marketers should always have the answers! With all the information provided through Big Data marketers should be able to sort this data to answer key questions like:
- Who are we contacting?
- When is this person available to be contacted?
- How would you go about contacting them?
- What should you be offering them?
Answering these questions will allow a company to segment their users and use forecast analytics to predict future behaviours.
Campaign efficiency and budget optimisation go hand in hand! Knowing how often your user will be online and their preferred platforms will allow for more focused marketing efforts by targeting customers in their “familiar environment”. This will ensure marketers are focusing on platforms that have high levels of conversions, guaranteeing revenue and positively impacting ROI, helping them manage their budgets better.
5. Analyse Campaign Results
Lastly, Big Data allows marketers to measure their campaign performance. This is the most important part of digital marketing. Marketers will use reports to measure any negative changes to marketing KPI’s. If they have not achieved the desired results it will be a signal that the strategy would need to be changed in order to maximise revenue and make your marketing efforts more scalable in future.
And there you have it! Big Data is everywhere and it is a crucial part of any business today. Knowing how to target your customers and shaping your content based on user information will increase the effectiveness of your campaign, putting you on the road to success.
Knowledge Is Power
Take control of your digital marketing efforts today! Check out our blog to learn all there is to know about digital marketing.
