BigDataScalability.com – Successful marketing doesn’t come with a shortcut. Many involved aspects play a key role in achieving the goals, among which is big data analytics. Big data in marketing helps maximize the scope, allowing the markets to recognize your presence and separate your products from others.
A few decades ago, marketing decisions were based on intuition and experience. But experiment and data analysis are more valid in this digital era. That’s why learning about big data analytics becomes essential when you are planning to optimize your business marketing.
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What Is Big Data in Marketing?
Understanding big data could be easier if you know what data means. Data refers to the information and operations that are recorded and stored in various forms, commonly performed by computers.
In layman’s terms, big data can be defined as a huge number and amount of information and operations. But in further definition, it doesn’t refer solely to the data but also challenges and capabilities in storing and analyzing a huge amount of data to support decision-making in marketing.
Meanwhile, big data analytics refer to a complex process of analyzing big data to reveal further information, such as market trends, customer preferences, and patterns, all of which help organization make better business decisions.
Three main elements can describe big data, including volume, velocity, and variety. Volume means big data comes in the form of a large amount of information that is processed. Velocity refers to how quickly the data is collected while variety means different types of data required to work.
Though having big data doesn’t automatically provide you with better marketing, it promises the potential. Let’s say that big data in marketing is one of the secret ingredients that give you a hint of success—it gives you more insights into the decisions and actions you should take.
Marketers know 3 types of big data, including customer, financial, and operational data. Each type can be obtained from different sources and can help you in different ways.
1. Customer
Customers are the target of organizations to market their products. Collecting customer data allows marketers to understand target preferences so they can provide what their audience wants. This type of data may include but is not limited to names, email addresses, and history of purchases.
Customer data can be gathered from several sources, such as surveys, social media activities, and online communities.
2. Financial
Financial data is another type of big data in marketing. Collecting financial information allows you to measure performance, thus your organization can operate efficiently. This category includes marketing statistics, sales, margins, and costs of your organization.
What’s interesting, you might include financial data of your competitors in this category. Knowing your competitor’s pricing, for example, helps you make an accurate decision before joining the market competition.
3. Operational
Operational data refers to all the information related to the business process. Shipping, logistics, hardware, and management system fall into this category. Using this data, marketers can improve the performance of the organizations and reduce costs at the same time.
Ways to Collect Big Data
Now that you know the three main types of big data in marketing, let’s take a look at how an organization can collect information, particularly customer data. There are different ways to try it out, but the following methods are the most popular:
1. Asking the Customers
When making an online purchase on your website, customers need to provide their personal information such as name, contact info, and location before proceeding. This is a brilliant method to gather customer data while keeping your business professional.
Another method to ask for customers’ data is by throwing a survey. During this survey, some questions are involved to help your organization profile the customer and understand their preferences.
2. Social Media Activities
Social media works efficiently to help you collect customer data. Some social media apps trace the activities and data of the users, allowing you to better understand the target audience. Besides, activities that involve customers such as polls can help you with retargeting.
3. Loyalty Programs
With loyalty programs, customers can collect points for every purchase and get rewards. Not only does this program ensure the customers keep buying your products, but also it helps marketers to gather data for retargeting.
4. Data Companies
It is not uncommon that organizations and companies to purchase data from third-party companies. This method is legal to collect big data in marketing and there are plenty of companies to choose from.
Most data companies have specific sources for their data collection and they can make profits from selling them. Any organization which needs customer data can purchase and use it for various purposes.
What about collecting methods of operational and financial data? Companies can use their internal data along with market analysis from various sources. Thus, they can understand company performance, pricing, sales, margins, and other components to draw a conclusion.
Main Uses of Big Data in Marketing
At this point, it is pretty clear that big data plays an essential role in your marketing success. But we haven’t explained the uses of big data in marketing research so far. Take a closer look at the main uses below:
1. Build Engagement with Customers
One of the marketing goals is to build a better engagement with customers. Big data in marketing allows marketers to understand customers and their preferences, thus better decisions can be made. This also helps ensure customers can enjoy a better experience when finding a product.
For instance, your data shows that customers are attracted to e-commerce platforms due to their cashback and loyalty program rewards. Marketers can build strategies to promote the benefits of these programs to garner more consumers.
Furthermore, data about customer preferences and current trends can benefit you in terms of product recommendations. It helps you provide accurate information about which items and when to display them to increase sales, aside from making the customers enjoy their time on your platform.
2. Determine Brand Positioning
Big data in marketing helps with product or brand positioning. It serves as the source of categorizations that can be used to position your brand in the market properly, allowing your business to reach customers efficiently.
This marketing strategy is quite similar to differentiation which gives you a hint of why your brand can be well-accepted by which consumer base. Having this idea can help you determine the niche to join and arrange a strategy that is powerful enough to grab the attention of the audience.
There are several aspects to consider when it comes to brand positioning, including price, target audience, and quality. With these pointers in mind, marketers can make the brand stand out among competitors.
3. Optimize Prices
Big data in marketing provide you with detailed information about the competitors’ prices and inflation rates from year to year. This helps the companies gain more insights into consumers’ purchasing power and use it to make a strategy to improve sales and avoid losses.
Despite the marketing team doesn’t really control price regulation, they can provide pricing suggestions based on the big data to make sure the products can compete with their competitors. Besides, the data can also help the company make a strategy to clear the old products.
4. Design Ads and Campaigns
Social media is one of the potential sources of big data because the marketing team can take a closer look at the current trend, allowing them to adapt a similar strategy for their companies. And when it comes to grabbing the attention of the audience, campaigns and ads have got you covered.
Social media campaigns are the most widely used marketing strategy to reach the target market because it is designed to allow everyone to participate. At this point, big data in marketing offers an accurate picture of your target so you can segment the customers and reach them.
Advertisement is another strategy of marketing that can be performed on various channels. Big data helps with advertisements to better target consumers by providing the marketers with insights into what kind of ads your audience wants to see and potential content for effective marketing.
5. Bring AI to the Marketing Strategy
Dealing with a huge volume of data is not an easy process. This is where artificial intelligence comes to make everything easier. Machine learning uses complex algorithms to process big data so that marketers can uncover patterns and gain clear pictures of the consumers.
Big data in marketing makes AI part of your strategy. Artificial intelligence is the future of marketing for it helps you learn more about the data and analyze it in a better way to create an accurate strategy.
Biggest Challenges to Big Data Analytics
Using big data in your companies and organizations undoubtedly gives a lot of benefits. However, some challenges might hinder marketers from incorporating big data for marketing. From various sources to processing systems, these things make big data application becomes more challenging.
1. Enormous Data from Various Sources
Big data involves enormous volumes of data from customer, operational, and financial aspects. Collecting a huge number of data takes more time and effort because they come from various sources.
This can be a challenge for marketers as it can cause a disconnect between consumers and organizations. The more time required to acquire data, the bigger the disconnect.
Besides, it is necessary to keep in mind that more data is not always better. The marketers need to be selective in picking the data to make sure they only take the right one so that big data in marketing can really work.
2. Sources of Streaming Data
Streaming data is one of the challenges of big data in marketing. Internet of Things (IoT) systems have plenty of sensors so marketers need to be careful when it comes to determining streaming data quantity. Besides, real-time processing is required to make sure the acquired data is usable.
Some streaming data such as website clicks and GPS can detect customer behavior so that they can provide essential information. Marketers can use cloud platforms to take full advantage of streaming data.
3. Analytical Tools
When the volume of big data in marketing grows, the marketers have less time to make decisions and take actions This is where analytical tools come into play, helping the marketers to analyze data and reveal insights into the most potent strategies.
However, choosing the right tool can be daunting. This is another challenge for the marketing team to find a great analytical tool that can quickly process big data.
Big data is an essential factor in marketing success. It provides more insights into potential marketing strategies by analyzing three types of data, including customers, financial, and operational. Marketers can collect big data in several ways, such as asking the consumers or acquiring internal data.
However, the use of big data in marketing isn’t always easy. The marketers have to deal with some challenges like disparate data systems, streaming data sources, and analytical tool choices.
