Is your business utilizing Big data in marketing ?

Google knows what you’re searching or even remotely interested in. Facebook knows what you share, who you’re friends with, where you hang out, where you holiday, which city you have roots in, studied in and where you live.

Amazon knows what you buy, what you gift !!

And all this is they help you with for free! — Basically, when you’re not paying them a dime and every platform is available for free, then “YOU” ARE THE PRODUCT!

and what are you paying the companies with ? — Yes, Data !!

Marketers today have mountain loads of data about you — You’re either a consumer or a prospect. However, this data that flows in through social media and various platforms is massively unstructured.A recent survey says that 80% of the data created in the world are unstructured. With tonnes of unstructured data flowing in at a skyrocketing speed, it is difficult for our good old relational databases to analyse them and give us the solution that we are asking for and that too in a jiffy.

Who saves the day in this case ?

Of course, Big Data !!

So what is Big Data?

The name is the game !! Big data is extremely large volumes of data which can be analyzed, sliced and diced to reveal data trends, patterns and even predict future growth and trends.

It is not only enormous in volume but also is the foundation of modern and future marketing since it gives businesses the power to analyse human behaviour and interactions using it.

How do you store Big Data?

Well big data is data that's exceeding terabytes of space so makes sense to use specialized systems for it. Hadoop is a popular tool that allows you to store and save Big data which can later be used for querying. NoSQl is another popular option. Hive is a popular data management SQL query like way of accessing Big data. Presto is another Facebook developed query engine to handle Big Data.

The Big Data stack , Source: Informatica blog

Big data rose to fame in the early 2000’s and ever since more and more businesses have recognized it as a tool to aid employees work efficiently. With the help of big data, combined with the concepts of machine learning and deep computing, organizations are able to predict potential issues, understand interactions and come up with solutions and plans.

Importance of Big Data:

Big data doesn’t really relate to the amount of data you have but the result of the analysis that you derive:

It helps you derive solutions on the following:

• Minimizing cost
• Eradicating failures
• Analyzing customer buying habits
• Reducing time
• Simplifying Decision making and much more

Sharing some use cases for Big data in marketing from a research done by Datameer :

• Customer Analytics (48%),
• Operational Analytics (21%),
• Fraud and Compliance (12%)
• New Product & Service Innovation (10%) &
• Enterprise Data Warehouse Optimization (10%)

How you can benefit from Big data as a marketer:

Research showing how marketers can harness Big Data to form more meaningful relationships with customers, Source: Forrester

Research showing how marketers can harness Big Data to form more meaningful relationships with customers, Source: Forrester

1. Pulling out outside data from other platforms for decision making

Ad messaging and re-targeting are a huge benefit of Big Data. You’d argue its basic pixels at play but no, there’s more !! The pixels are identifying your last looked at shoes on Amazon among the millions of records when you step into a blog or etsy etc.

In a time when marketers want to deliver everything faster, better, quicker, Big Data ensures you have that edge.

2. Customer service revisited

Customer service has been replaced by new systems that read big data and this data is used to interpret and analyze customer responses and derive with responses and reports.

3. Risk identification

Big data can identify fraud and risks faced by the organisations or to the product in a campaign.

4. Increase quality of data stored

Big data lets you analyse which data is relevant and which isn’t. It helps you delete junk data that might not be required in future or those that are infrequent and less redundant.

5. Laser sharp targeting:

The times of spray and pray marketing are dead. Today customers are targeted according to their behaviour, likes and interests. I.e. the marketers have started providing their customers a personalised version of their products and services.

Big data lets businesses uncover the browser activity, web activity, search data, track social media activity and searches, demographic location and much more to target specific customers and campaign according to their likes effectively. This is totally going to improve user experience and increase customer satisfaction.

Conclusion:

With growth being centre-stage to a million strong user database, knowing what your users want or crave is key. Imagine knowing insights like “Next years summer fashion colour will be Blue” or “Men in Alaska are crazy about Movember” . As a marketer there’s a ton of activity you can plan around such insights if its your target audience.

Big data is totally here to stay.

Written in collaboration with colleague Deepika and Originally published at blog.alore.io on March 19, 2018.