HOW TO: Make better decisions using big data

Make better decisions using big data

There’s a lot of hype around big data these days, but what does it actually mean to marketers? Michael Plimsoll, industry marketing director, Adobe, provides top tips on how brands can use big data to their advantage.

It is an undeniable fact that there is now more data than ever before. Mobile data saw the growth rate become exponential, and now with the ‘internet of things’ and connected devices, the rate is almost logarithmic. In parallel to this growth, the techniques and technologies that make handling this volume of data have become more affordable, leading to the rise of “Big Data”.

For marketers, having access to the right big data tools (and the data of course) allows them to do what they have always wanted to do understand the true behaviour of their customers and to engage with them in a more relevant, personalised and one-to-one way. This is achieved by bringing together and then making sense of all the data left behind by their customer’s interactions with them i.e. exhaust data. With this we can find out which campaigns they have been exposed to, the devices they use and what content engages them the most.

From this insight action can be taken, allowing marketers to reach prospects at the right point in the purchasing cycle with the right message.

So, despite the potential advantages it gives to marketers, it may be surprising to learn that two-thirds haven’t even heard of big rata. Our Click Here: The State of Online Advertising research also found that of those who have heard of it, only 23 per cent know that it has the ability to look at every transaction a customer makes.

Here are some top tips on how to find ‘big answers’ from big data:

1) Understand your objectives and identify which data is relevant

The biggest challenge marketers face is knowing which data is relevant. It should be about the right data and not just any data. By clearly stating the questions you look to answer up front, you can by-pass all the noise and focus on bringing together the right data for those questions such as: What is the real value of each marketing touch point? What is the right media mix? Which content leads to increased conversion?

2) Create a single view of the customer across all channels

It’s not enough to analyse just one of your customers’ channels or verticals at a time; we need to bring them all together to create a single customer view, helping marketers to understand their true behaviour and journeys, whilst providing the capability to maintain a consistent and relevant customer experience.

3) Big data is social

There is no better place to gauge sentiment than social media, with users posting millions of opinions every second. This data is invaluable to businesses that can use it for planning demand for a new product, or predicting the growth in revenue from a marketing campaign. And, with the right tools, digital marketers can even use historical social data to predict how many likes, comments and shares each Facebook post will earn as well as suggesting ideal timing to improve how that content will perform.

4) Embrace rocket science

The volume of data involved in big data is ideal for feeding the data hungry algorithms of predictive analytics. Identify new segments of customers to target with the right messaging through cluster analysis, expand on existing segments with look-a-like modelling, or predict the ideal mix for your media. Whatever you do, you can leverage Big Data to take the guess work out of marketing.

5) Combine structured and unstructured data

Managing unstructured data can be a huge challenge for any business and increased value comes when they can link it to their structured data. Sentiment analysis and natural language processing (NLP) can help to combine unstructured data with other structured data and allow them to better understand their audiences, gaining a huge competitive advantage. More advanced techniques like semantic processing and ontology repositories are also potential ways of making more sense of this unstructured data.

6) Speed is of the essence

Nowadays the big data opportunity only exists for marketers if ‘big data’ is turned into ‘speed data’. We can no longer wait for number crunchers to come back days or even weeks later with an insight on whether a campaign worked or didn’t work, it’s too late then to make any changes.  The key to unlocking the power of such a huge amount of intelligence and granular data is the ability to act on it in real-time, taking into account changing customer needs and preferences.

7) The human investment is necessary

Finally, while we can get the machines to do the work where possible (algorithms, machine-learning etc.) we can’t forget the human investment still needed to really take advantage of your big data.

 

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