Marketers and big data have something in common: both of them share a profound desire to discover as much as possible about their target audience.
However, unlike some marketers, big data can virtually answer any question one could have about the ways to increase revenues, understand customer behavior, and improve brand image. Many companies today use it to advance their business because of its undeniable usefulness for leveraging the power of data to fuel sales.
So it makes a perfect sense to use big data in marketing strategy. But how to leverage its power in the most effective way? And how can a company translate big data into profits as fast as possible?
There are several ways to do that. Check them out below.
1. Creation of personalized products and services
Time and relevancy are everything in marketing. Even the best strategy in the world will fail if implemented at the wrong time. One should not underestimate the importance of these two factors because they don’t just mean you should work fast but also that they are the essence of successful marketing campaigns that provide customer engagement exactly when needed.
Marketers need to know their customers to ensure that the products and services are appealing to them. That’s why they utilize big data channels to obtain information about the interests and preferences of prospects and current customers and create value for them. The list of the most common channels for getting this information includes websites and social media.
2. Informing of the marketing strategy by analyzing search engines’ trends
One of the easiest ways in which marketers can see big data in action is by monitoring Google Trends. After arriving at the tech scene in 2008, this tool has been incredibly useful in the online business because of the opportunities it provided. For example, it identified the most popular topics using a simple method: quantification of how often specific keywords are entered relative to the total number of searches.
Currently, Google Trends is one of the most widely used tools for checking business health in multiple areas, such as the effectiveness of content and decision making process and creation of value. The results of this analysis are further used to inform marketing strategies and get ahead of the game.
3. Determination of effective content
The marketers who worked before big data had one huge problem on their hands: they had no way of knowing whether a content their produce was successful. Just imagine how difficult it was for them and how much more they had to do to reach their targets. Big data eliminated the need for additional analysis and allowed to answer the question of effectiveness.
By using big data, marketers can analyze the effectiveness of their marketing with incredible precision. As the result, the overall effectiveness of marketing campaigns increased dramatically. Plus, a more detailed description of relevant content types and customer interests was also made possible.
4. Clear definition of ideal customer profile (ICP)
Another profound challenge that was faced the marketers until the arrival of big data was an identification of ideal customers for their products and services. Even though they used educated guesses to make predictions of customer profile, they could not prove their institution was correct. Today, however, the task of defining the ICPs is a lot easier to accomplish because digital information allows shedding light on all assumptions.
The definition has profound implications for marketing campaigns. If marketers don’t know their buyers, they won’t be able to sell them anything, says Mark Grimes – marketing development manager at College Papers . This law has been taken to the next level by big data because it helped to create extremely specific ICPs.
5. Advancement of lead scoring methods
Big data can predict the future! Well, future lead behavior. It is done through predictive analytics that generates models based on the previous behavior patterns and third-party online data. By analyzing the results provided by predictive analytics, marketers have a vision of the most effective lead scoring activities.
This knowledge is the foundation for lead nurturing strategies that give companies a competitive advantage. For example, recent research revealed that businesses that used effective lead nurturing strategies generated 50 percent more sales-ready leads. On top of that, each one of them cost 33 percent less!
Key takeaways
Let’s make one thing clear: big data is not a sure way to eliminate bad marketing decisions and increase revenues overnight. It is, however, excellent for decreasing the probability of human error in decision making, validating suggestions, and proposing trends.
Another thing: you need to give those large volumes of data a human face by making the connection between numbers and customer experience.
Once you’ve learned to leverage the power of using big data, you will create highly-targeted campaigns that will increase your profits and eliminate inefficiencies. Sounds like a good reason, agree?
