Computation creates tones of consumer data every second. GPS tracking provides location of people who use certain mobile apps, social networks are huge data bases of peoples behavior and attitudes, while search engines record peoples interests and daily needs. All this data can be very useful for marketers, but until recently they werent able to study all this information, because this task was too technically demanding for data software used in the past.
Now with the introduction of advanced software made exclusively for big data analysis like Apache Hadoop for example, companies have the chance to use all this information for improving their sales. Since big data analysis is already in use in many Fortune 500 companies and adequate software is easy to find online, theres no reason for marketers not to use all benefits big data brings.
Benefits of Big Data
There are plenty of benefits big data analysis can bring to both startups and established corporate enterprises. Some of these benefits are:
Identifying New Customers
Big data, especially information stored by social networks, introduce marketers with great detail of consumers behavior and interests. This enables marketers to add more variables to their audience targeting. Traditionally, marketers only used demographic terms for targeting their customer base, which usually includes: age, location, marital status and education. Now with increased number of parameters provided, marketers are able to identify more customers who would be interested in buying their product and target their audience much more accurately than before.
One of great examples of big data possibilities is the new Facebook Insights tool. It analyzes this social networks big data and provides insights about consumers lifestyle, likes, household info, purchasing habits, etc.
Finding New Marketing Opportunities
Products need constant upgrades and big data analysis can provide marketers with patterns that can be used for improving their existing segments or features and finding new marketing opportunities.
Giving Great Offers to Existing Customers
Customers respect a companys effort to present them with new products they might be interested in. Amazon.com is the top dog when it comes to product recommendation. Thats mainly because their marketers use this websites big data to give their customers offers they cant refuse. Amazon statistics say that more than 35% of website sales is fueled by their recommendation engine.
Making More Profitable Ads
We already talked about improved audience targeting opportunities that big data analytics offers, but theres much more to this. Information gained from social networks and search engines can be used for creating more attractive and effective ad campaigns. This is frequently used by ad platforms like Google AdWords and Facebook Ads.
If a marketer knows what consumers are looking for they can create more suitable ads. If targeted audience is doing frequent researches about low cost flights, marketers can add promotional ticket prices to their ads.
Measuring Campaign Results More Accurately
Big data sources can also be used for measuring campaign performance and effectiveness of individual media channels. Accurate campaign results can save plenty of companys funds intended for future campaigns, by directing it to the media channels and ads that offer the best performance.
Required Tools and Skills
Many marketers have problems with implementing the right procedures for big data analytics. Before they start working, they need to do elaborate reading and learn the basic big data analysis procedures.
Finding tools that will make big data more accountable is another very important requirement. Some of the most widely used big data tools are:
- Business intelligence tools– enables marketers to retrieve, analyze and transform data into useful marketing information;
- Predictive analytics tools– help marketers to extract valuable information, determine patterns and make predictions;
- Data visualization tools– are used for making easy understandable graphs and charts;
- Marketing automation tools– used for running marketing campaigns through many different channels;
Since technology is very important for managing big data and using 100% of its capabilities, marketers need to choose their tools wisely and ask for both expert and user opinions. Reference websites like Cloudswave offer great insights for all business software, including tools required for managing big data.
Using big data is not the only prerequisite for success. Only skillful marketers with wide knowledge in psychology and sociology can implement it in the way that will enable them to create attractive marketing campaigns and outflank their competition.
