Big Data and Marketing - It's Essentially Essential

Marketing is a science. Then again, it is also an art. One needs an understanding of human sentiments and emotions to grasp why a certain brand is preferred over another. At the same time, unless you are supported by hard facts, data and proper analysis it becomes difficult to reach any kind of conclusion - even an emotional one.

The world sees information being churned out at a humongous rate - IBM suggests it is 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every date -data from satellites, posts from social sites, mobile usage statistics, internet consumption rates, traffic patterns, content in form of words, audio and video, ….its an endless list.

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For marketers the scope is teensy-weensy bit smaller. We only have to analyze the foot-falls, the buying patterns, the information exchange patterns, the economic trends, the competition. We have to be aware of what policy changes are happening in country A and how that will affect our sales in country B.  There has to be a constant study of which email campaign worked, why it worked, what's the click through rate, how many unsubscribes. Are there any cross-sell opportunities with our current customers, how do we profile new prospects…...Whew!!!! And, this does not even cover a miniscule portion of data we need to collect and analyze.

This is where Big Data comes in. Data would be considered Big if it covers 3 dimensions - Volume (the amount of data generated), Velocity (the speed with which data is generated) and variety (the kind and type of data being generated).

If the above list indicates anything its this - Marketers are being hit with Big Data from all sides. But the challenges are numerous. Most organizations do not have a streamlined process for collecting data. This means either the data is not collected frequently and consistently or, it is not in real-time. There is also a lack of data-sharing across the organization and marketing communications are still not personalized to reflect this data. The 2013 Big Data for Marketing survey* shows that 30% of those surveyed are still having a hard time understanding how, exactly, marketing analytics could be used in their companies.

What is needed are tools and techniques capable of handling such data. Such tools will help replace guesswork with insights, pinpoint trends and help analyze information so you are able to make faster and relevant decisions. On a broad scale these tools can be classified as analytics tools, predictive analytics tools and data driven automation tools.

Few companies are already becoming comfortable on this bandwagon. Amazon not only accesses and analyzes its daily visitor patters and provides them with suggestions on 'items of interest' but also has the agility to incorporate the now for business profit.  The day Michael Jackson passed away Amazon reconfigured their whole MP3 store within 2 hours**. This gave them access to a revenue stream that others were still unsure on how to tap. Linkedin, the world's largest professional networking site with over 200Mn+ members, can at any time pull in statistics which help decipher a company's attrition rate, regional expansion patterns and much more.

The market is seeing a number of players specializing in helping organizations in deciphering what their data means and then utilizing it optimally.  A good example is the India based company Vizury which helps e-commerce and online travel companies harness their digital data assets for micro-targeting highly-pertinent ads to website visitors.

Do you have more examples of how Big Data is being used by marketers? Do share.

*http://www.ibmbigdatahub.com/blog/moneyball-meets-marketing-leveraging-big-data-analytics-improve-results

 **http://www.toprankblog.com/2012/08/big-data-what-marketers-need-to-know/