Value in Big Data for Marketing

“Without data analytics, companies are blind and deaf, wandering around like deer on the high way.” - Geoffrey Moore.

We never heard as much about Big Data than now. It is everywhere, and more precisely, according to Forbes, it is used for Customer Analytics (48%), Operational Analytics (21%), Fraud and Compliance (12%) New Product & Service Innovation (10%) & Enterprise Data Warehouse Optimization (10%) in sales and marketing. 

This represents a real opportunity for marketers to dive into their customers' mind.

According to the American Marketing Association (AMA), the marketing is « the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. »

It is now easy to see the link between marketing and big data.

Big data can be the secret ingredient in marketing. I am not saying that it makes everything, far from that, but it gives you all the elements you need to draw the proper conclusion. This makes it easier to make informed marketing decisions when you have more information. All will depend on the action and decision you will take. For example: 

- Segmentation: gender, age, location, profession, … Knowing your audience better so that marketing and SEO are in line with your target.

- Identification: focus on the content that transforms the prospect into a customer, then from customer to loyal customer, ..., as well as the effects on conversion rates.

- Evaluation: measure the performance of a campaign in order to verify its efficiency: comparison between blogs and social networks, communication channels, ...

Understanding behaviour: review customer data to better define their needs. For example, the results of Western Union's analysis allowed the company to tailor its offerings to its customers' most common expenses, rent and tuition.

It exists 3 types of big data advantageous for marketing: 

- Customer: marketing campaigns, points of sale, websites, customer surveys, social networks, online communities and loyalty programs can be good sources to give information about the customers' behaviour and transactions.

- Operational: here, we generally refer to objective metrics that assess the efficiency of marketing operations related to marketing processes, resource allocation, asset management, budgetary controls, ...

- Financial: data to assess a company's financial capability. Examples include sales, revenues, profits, ...

As a marketer, it becomes possible to: 

Develop a more precise profile for the target customer(s);

Predict consumer response to marketing messages and product offerings;

Personalize marketing messages and product offerings;

Improve the strategy of production and distribution;

Produce and apply more reliable assessment measures;

Perfect digital marketing and campaign-based strategies;

Retain more customers in a less expensive way; 

Get product insights, …

We can wonder what can be the future of big data in marketing. 

For some experts, the role of big data in marketing will continue to increase as machine learning will evolve which would allow scientist to analyse data more and more quickly. 

For some more, the major impact will be on personalization of products and services, when others see a financial interest thanks to the speed increase of development for marketing messages. 

What is sure is that the ethical question will be more and more important as the data collected will increase. We can expect an increase in privacy and security laws as companies collect more data.

References:

Columbus L., 2016. 'Ten Ways Big Data Is Revolutionizing Marketing And Sales', Forbes. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2016/05/09/ten-ways-big-data-is-revolutionizing-marketing-and-sales/#fd69ff921cff

Goldfein J., 2019. 'Big Data & Marketing: Value, Problems, and Solutions', mercury.one. Available at: https://mercury.one/digital-marketing/big-data-marketing-value-problems-and-solutions/

'Big Data, Bigger Marketing', sas.com. Available at: https://www.sas.com/en_ie/insights/big-data/big-data-marketing.html

'Definitions of Marketing', ama.org. Available at: https://www.ama.org/the-definition-of-marketing-what-is-marketing/

Luenendonk, M., 2014. 'Best Uses of Big Data in Marketing', cleverism.com. Available at: https://www.cleverism.com/best-uses-big-data-marketing/