What Marketers Really Need To Know About Big Data

Big data is a game changer. But is big data a tech or marketing tool? The answer is both. Big data plays a role in marketing campaigns and gathering insight. To utilize big data most effectively, marketers must understand its use in the following roles.
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Big data is a game changer. But is big data a tech or marketing tool? The answer is both. Big data plays a role in marketing campaigns and gathering insight. To utilize big data most effectively, marketers must understand its use in the following roles.

Trends and Predictive Analytics

Salesforce.com highlights the role of Google Trends as a key player. Google Trends takes big data analysis to the big leagues. It cuts out all of the current trending topics and focuses on the ones with the greatest reach, quantifying the frequency of each searched term and comparing it to the total amount of searches. This helps marketers to expand their reach more than ever. It's easy to get complacent with search words you already know. With tools like Google Trends, you can find new trends and new markets. Think about the growth of video screens in places of worship, for example. Marketers consistently focus on entertainment and office environments that need large video screens. But by using tools like Google trends can you see the demand and need for services outside of your usual targets and grow to meet changing needs and expanding your reach.

Predictive analytics is another big data strategy. Predictive analytics is an area of data mining that extracts information from existing data sets to determine behavior patterns and predict future trends. Forbes talks about its progressive and aggressive nature. It looks at scores of historical data and analyzes it with incredible speeds. It can literally pinpoint the exact process that makes for successful leads. Predictive data allows marketers to learn more about their target customers than ever before. Using predictive data analytics will drastically change your selling cycles. Instead of waiting for your clients to request additional services, you can predict their needs.

Persona Creation

Much like SEO techniques in the past, big data will change the way we create and use buyer personas. Buyer personas are generally use in marketing efforts to pinpoint a certain customer. According to Salesforce.com, companies usually create personas from data gleaned from their websites and from feedback from sales teams and call centers, which misses huge pools of data. Using big data, social media, blog posts, and marketing campaigns can be geared to more specific customers by targeting demographics in much larger ways. A multimarket approach breaks the generic mould. A small business owner will use your services if they see blog posts geared to them; this is the same for other markets like health care and education. By gearing posts to different people, you gain loyalty from a larger group of markets.

Personalization and Customization

Every marketer knows the effectiveness of personalization and customization. When your customers think you are talking to them directly, they become loyal to your brand. It's also important to make sure you send the right message at the right time to secure customer loyalty. Using big data, you can see who's interacting with your brand in real time. Armed with this information, marketers can send personalized and customized responses. You can merge big data with existing CRM practices, and keep tabs on trends of potential buyers as well as current customers. As you track these patterns, you can send customers individualized content creating greater customer retention. Let's say your customer is looking for new services for the latest project they are taking on. By sending personalized content, you create a relationship that makes them feel like you care about their success. This is how you create loyalty.

Marketers who ignore big data, even small data, will be left behind. Don't let that be you.

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