Marketing is driven by creativity. But it’s also driven by knowing your customers, knowing their wants, and knowing the best possible ways to communicate with them.
To that end, you need insight.
Nowadays, big data is an essential part of becoming an online marketer, from basic SEO to advanced PPC to assist with better ROI and conversions, and is proving to be the best insight generating practice that the modern business has at its disposal.
The ability to collect and collate vast swathes of data on your customers to generate reports and better understandings has already helped businesses tremendously in planning new products, improving services, and finding pain points.
It could also help you transform your marketing. Here’s how.
How it works
Big data leverages data points from a wide variety of sources that all come together in a centralized system that allows you to investigate and generate reports based on them to create new insights.
These insights can include everything from how your customer is most likely to first learn about your brand to how you get the majority of your traffic.
It requires big data databases, including options like Cassandra and Hbase,
which are designed to handle large volumes of different types of data at a processing velocity that allows you to quickly search and sort through them.
Data analytics tools like KNIME and OpenRefine clean and reformat data, allowing users to interrogate the data.
Data visualization tools then allow you to create reports and graphical representations of data that can help you better answer questions and generate readable information. Some tools like Plotly need a level of programming skills, but others such as Tableau have easier to use drag and drop products which don't need programming.
Of course, at scale this requires big data analysts and scientists to make the best use of the data. It’s a technically demanding undertaking, but the rewards are worth it.
Big data is for small businesses too
However, there are also plenty of options for small businesses and individuals to gain insights using big data.
Google Trends is one of the most easily used big data tools, with Google’s extensive database of search information allowing users to monitor industry trends.
From specific keywords to shifting interests in different topics and the latest hot-button issues in the industry, it can help inform you of the zeitgeist.
Many companies will use Google Trends, alongside their own analytics, to determine which keywords they should be focusing on in SEO, or what kinds of content are currently grabbing the most attention.
Small businesses trying to get an understanding of keywords, organic traffic and its competition can use Wordtracker which uses big data to provide a greater insight for online marketing efforts for organic SEO and paid search campaigns. The tool can help your marketing team dig into the granular structure of your website and its assets.
Understand your market better
Many companies still rely on very shaky data capture models, or simple guesswork, to best estimate what their market demographics look like.
Nowadays, you can capture accurate information from sign-up forms, questionnaires, social media followers, and much more to get a better idea of who your customers actually are.
You can use big data analytics to define your ideal customer profile much more clearly, which lets you craft your marketing message to them in a much more targeted way, using both the marketing language and the channels they’re most likely to connect with.
Market the hottest deals
Understanding which of your products and services are the most profitable can help make your marketing as effective as possible.
People will come for the high-demand options and stay for the other services you offer.
This Walmart case study shows how companies with inventories as large and diverse as the retail giant can use big data to better understand customer shopping habits.
Besides using that information to improve their stores and customer service, it helps them know which products are hot from moment to moment, allowing them to adapt marketing to spending trends much more effectively and quickly.
Identifying your most effective sales funnel techniques
This is a technique that’s already being used to some degree.
Tools like Google Analytics and social media analytics tools already allow you to see which tweets, links, images, and other resources are most effective at driving clicks and bringing customers closer to conversion.
Big data simply allows you to pair those already widely available sources of information to a much larger body of insight on the customers. With this knowledge you can identify and replicate your most effective content and links using other data points to make them more relevant to customer trends, driving more people further down the marketing funnel.
Preventing failure
Guesswork in marketing may have long been considered a crucial part of the process. To learn what works, you also need to learn what doesn’t work, was the theory.
However, big data analysis, particularly in gathering information on what generates interest and what doesn’t, is allowing businesses and marketing teams to save a great deal of money by eliminating that guesswork.
You will spend less time, effort, and funding on marketing campaigns that were doomed to fail in the first place.
Techniques like content scoring, tracking how individual content assets and campaigns perform in generating leads and opportunities, allow you to connect different content marketing assets and strategies together to generate a much broader picture.
The growing world of Big Data
To many business owners and marketers, big data may still seem like a far-off solution in a science-fiction world, but the truth is that it’s here, and the demand for it is huge, particularly in marketing.
A study by Datameer found that 48% of all teams looking for big data analytics were specifically looking for it in customer analytics, as shown in this graph.
As a result, there are plenty of teams and tools already in place to help you build the marketing insights you need to produce better results.
The more data you can collect and the better you can use it, the more you can inform your marketing.
From its messaging to its methods, it will help you find exactly the right way to drive traffic, increase conversions, and retain more of your customers.
If you're not yet using it, it’s time to think about incorporating big data into your marketing.
