Srikanth
Big data is slowly expanding its empire and it is taking one domain at a time. The marketing and advertising sector, during the initial days, used to look upon big data with cynicism. However, time has come to embrace it with open arms and these sectors have started applying big data to produce meaningful actions. Nowadays, companies are up collecting huge amount of data, but sadly, they are often clueless about it. Big data, as the phrase indicates, does require a lot of data. But, that never translates to all the data related to your company.
It is here some companies are making effective interventions where factors like dynamic trade shifts, transactions of point-of-sale type as well as online activity of customers can now be prioritized rather than randomized data collection. These factors lead to insights regarding customer preference, priority as well as behaviour so that campaigns can now be more specific with marketing companies having full knowledge of the possible drifts and shifts. Data like retention cost, customer satisfaction and feedback as well average transaction per customer can be further used by big data to evaluate success parameters and reasons of failure.
Big data and its uses
Since the moment businesses have gone digital, simply focusing on the time a consumer spends on a particular website is not enough to understand the likes and dislikes. Rather, the complete online activity data is necessary to get comprehensive insights and furthermore, make effective marketing campaigns. However, user behaviour can accommodate huge amount of data and collecting such data for every potential customer can create pandemonium. It is here analytics plays a pivotal role as the data scientists will determine the necessary data depending on what kind of information you want instead of simple collection and storage procedure.
Among the analytics techniques that are used on big data, the most effective and the most sough-after technique is the predictive analytics. By examining historical trends as well as present data, predictive analytics can tell you about the future potential. In terms of marketing, this seems like a perfect fit since customer motivations are the most difficult to guess. New companies are coming up based on this business framework that would let companies know what kind of deals should target which group of people for best results. Surely, that not only ensures that the budget behind marketing is used properly but also increases the efficiency of the process many times.
Being adventurous
The crux of great marketing is taking risks and hence, risk analysis forms a major part of any advertising or marketing campaign. With big data analytics, it is so much easier to do such operations since marketing sectors are collaborating with analytics companies as well as other data sources to ensure that marketing decisions are categorized according to the risks precisely calculated from the data aggregates. Such is the power, you can respond immediately to a scenario unlike previously where you would have had to hold numerous meetings before a marketing decision could be achieved.
Most online companies are now using the previous browsing data to show new products. Be it Amazon, Netflix or eBay, every company stores the previous browsing history and based on the last few searches, it tries to predict and show similar products that may not have appeared during your browsing. Such a tactic is doing wonders in marketing and often, the user’s further involvement in the product determines whether such marketing attempts are working or not. In fact, that also determines the usage rate of the consumer.
The future must improve
While all these are commendable achievements, it is important to ensure that big data techniques do not reach a dead end. Currently, few companies have the infrastructure to include big data in their marketing strategy and fewer companies have the workforce to make this a reality. The future of marketing could be real-time ads and banners flashing across the social media or digital media the consumer is using depending on the immediate taste. Hence, rather than aggregating data and analysing taste, this is almost sensing it through big data. Surely, that would be the most direct method of advertising and marketing will no longer need decision making as such.
However, all these are just futuristic musings and it is only possible when new technologies emerge that would facilitate such changes. Since this data is after all private, data safety and security can be a major issue. The companies have to understand that safeguarding private data while using as well as storing is of paramount importance. Hence, new security measures need to be drawn out and implemented simultaneously while establishing the infrastructure for big data. The world is moving fast, but not fast enough for companies to incorporate big data in the bigger scheme of things. Hence, one has to wait before it all comes together.
