Leveraging Big Data in Today’s Digital Marketing

Numerous technological advancements have shaped and transformed marketing in the past few decades, but perhaps none are more profound than the impact of big data.

While emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) have now become ubiquitous in the industry, with startups like Audience Town and MathCapital pioneering this trend, digital marketing today is increasingly reliant on Big Data technology. In fact, a Forrester report found that nearly a third of digital marketing firms surveyed rely heavily on insights from Big Data when making decisions.

Leveraging Big Data

In the past, when marketers want to tweak a campaign, they’d have to sift through tons of sales data, click-through rates, and general behavior metrics. But with data streams generating staggering amounts of information a second in a campaign, companies are increasingly relying on properly analyzing insights from Big Data to boost sales and profits efficiently. Even the labor market in the industry is skewing towards positions that require technical know-how in data science. This has now changed how companies recruit specialists, with Maryville University noting that organizations now look for marketers that can blend strategy with advanced technology – making those with expertise in Big Data in-demand within the industry. By combining data scientists with tech-savvy marketers, organizations can start amassing and processing data to guide decisions and improve business outcomes.

That’s not a bad investment at all. Case in point, a University of Texas study found that Fortune 1000 companies saw an increase in revenue just by increasing data usability by 10%. Giants like Facebook, Google, and Amazon all leverage the huge amount of data their users generate to increase leads and connect marketers with their target audiences with ease and accuracy.

Predictive Marketing

What sets Big Data apart from using the ‘small data’ of the past is the level of consumer behavior understanding it provides digital marketers. This leads to what is now being called ‘predictive marketing’. For instance, French digital advertising company Publicis Groupe recently got a deal with media giant Disney for its Big Data smarts and capabilities. While there’s no shortage of data for the media giant, having the capacity to target specific moviegoers, streaming subscribers, and potential customers require highly personalized marketing campaigns.

As the name implies, predictive marketing determines the probability of success of different marketing strategies. By using a predictive model to analyze the current and planned marketing strategy, Big Data-driven marketers have the capacity to make more informed and accurate decisions. In real estate, Fast Company reports that companies like Entera utilize Big Data to serve property and agent recommendations to direct investors based on occupancy rates and other property metrics.

Influence customer behavior

Understanding customer behavior in this granular and practical level has never been possible in the past. By leveraging Big Data and applications like predictive marketing, data vendors can streamline marketing budgets, pivot campaigns in real-time, and discover new lead generation and conversion strategies. Most notable for pushing the envelope on this front is Amazon. By analyzing similar buying habits of similar market segments, they place ads that are relevant in “similar products” and “others usually buy it with this” functionalities. By using their enormous data, they have the capacity to upsell to customers, and influence and shape their purchase journey.

Despite the huge upfront cost in investments, Big Data adoption will likely continue in the digital marketing space in the next few years.

Written by Kathleen Fite exclusively for revaluate.com