Big Data marketing refers to the use of high-velocity, voluminous, and variable data to improve a company’s marketing efforts. When people think of the term Big Data, they often make the erroneous assumption that it’s just about the size of the datasets. However, Big Data refers to data expanding on two other fronts—velocity and variety.
High-velocity data is real-time data; the latest information available in real-time, for example, from website interactions. Variable data means the large variety of data gathered from multiple disparate sources, and it includes unstructured data, web analytics, social data, and mobile data.
Data-driven marketing is not a new concept—63 percent of companies increased their spending on data-driven marketing in 2016 alone, with more marketers recognizing the use of customer information for optimal and targeted marketing campaigns. However, Big Data offers a new paradigm for data-driven marketing, thanks to the affordability and accessibility of Hadoop systems, which combine software and hardware to process Big Data and get insights from it.
In this post, you’ll find out some examples of how marketing can benefit from Big Data, including some use cases and examples. Lastly, you’ll find out how Big Data helps with the lead generation process, which is a vital component of marketing.
How Marketing Benefits From Big Data
Here are just some ways you can use Big Data to improve your company’s marketing efforts:
Serve User-Specific Content
A large part of the success of streaming service Netflix is how it uses Big Data to serve up personalized recommendations of movies and TV shows that users are likely to enjoy. In the same way, digital marketers and content marketers can use Big Data analysis to serve up relevant, user-specific content on company websites.
Big Data marketing gives a unique opportunity to cater a website’s design and layout to each individual customer, therefore increasing the chance that they’ll make a purchase, subscribe to a newsletter, or take any other desired action.
Furthermore, Big Data insights give marketers the option to hone their strategies based on the type of content that most resonates with their buyers, with the ability to track buyer movement from tweeting about a blog post to making a purchase.
More Accurate Testing
A large part of the success of any marketing effort is testing different things out to see what works. Marketers often use A/B testing to test two different versions of landing pages, button designs in sign-up forms, different font types, and alternative colors to optimize conversion rates.
Instead of traditional A/B testing, Big Data can refine and improve testing approaches with increased accuracy by factoring in additional information, such as a visitor’s previous website interactions. This way, specific variants of web pages are served up to specific people based on what the data suggests they are most likely to engage with.
Better Customer Understanding
At the end of the day, successful marketing involves developing complete pictures of a company’s target customers and creating messages, products, or services relevant to those customers.
Big Data can complete the picture on customers by providing a wealth of information, including who they are, what they want, what influences their loyalty, and how they want to be contacted. This integration between marketing management and Big Data can really improve a company’s customer engagement and customer retention.
Algorithmic Marketing
Big Data can play a role in the transition towards more automated, algorithmic marketing. In conjunction with machine learning algorithms, which allow systems to learn things using data alone without explicit coding, Big Data systems can potentially process and analyze vast amounts of data in real-time to create better and more relevant interactions with consumers.
Predictive analyses that leverage Big Data and machine learning can update marketing copy, product prices, landing pages etc based on changing customer behavior, inventory, and other factors.
Real-Time Personalization
Good timing is a central component of running effective marketing campaigns. Marketers need to figure out the right time to send their messages to deliver the biggest impact. On-site pop-ups should be displayed at times in which people will engage with them. There are also nuances to sending out cart reminder emails or email marketing material at the right time. Big Data can assist with all of this by tying buyer digital behavior into CRM systems and marketing automation software.
Big Data & Lead Generation
Lead generation is when marketers identify and cultivate potential buyers for their company’s products or services. Check out this source to read more about implementing a successful lead generation process.
Building up a store of qualified leads is the real challenge for both B2C and B2B marketers. Companies need leads that are likely to be most interested in making a purchase and generating the most revenue.
Intelligent Big Data crawlers can scrape through thousands of websites, using the power of systems like Hadoop to analyze terabytes of data and find the best qualified leads for a company. Once the leads are pre-qualified with Big Data analytics, the job of the marketers is as simple as contacting those leads.
Summary
The accessibility of Big Data promises to revolutionize many aspects of modern business, allowing for more granular insights into the way in which customers behave and what they want from a product or service.
The access to all this data brings several benefits to the table in terms of optimizing a company’s marketing strategies. Combined with other promising technologies like machine learning, the Big Data marketing revolution looks set to continue apace in the coming years.
