A marketer's strength used to be recognised in brilliant ad campaigns, and TV was the best medium to advertise a brand. However, the value placed on television advertising has undergone significant changes over the last decade, as effective marketers seek to account for engagement metrics in the pricing. According to a study in 2012 by Columbia Business School, 91% of marketers believe successful brands use customer data to drive marketing decisions.
The universal desire to be data-driven is consistent with the stream of data created each day - 2.5 quintillion bytes to be exact. This data influx offers marketers the opportunity for real-time decision making analytics and strategies based on data-driven decisions.
But, the significance of big data for marketers is more than actionable results. Big data can once again prove a marketer's worth.
According to Rex Research, half a trillion dollars are spent each year on marketing, and 40% of that is wasted because marketers tend to focus too much on driving awareness and not enough on driving advocacy. The promise of big data is based on integrating new types of data for more precise campaign targeting and shifting the emphasis from instinctual to analytical decisions.
And in the "age of the customer", big data's most prominent advantage is expected to understand the customer. Data analytics turns marketing into a science and delivers a sustainable competitive advantage. When marketers understand their customers, their desires, what motivates them to buy, and how often they buy, marketers can create a meaningful relationship with their customers.
How can marketers unlock the potential of big data?
Collect data - One of the biggest challenges for marketers is effectively sharing data across departments and divisions in a company. Linking shared data at the customer-level will effectively target and personalise marketing efforts. Organisations need to hire employees dedicated to collecting data and understanding analytics to effectively gather information generated by digital, social and direct marketing.
Data quality - Without a good technology partner, databases of customers rapidly become contaminated with bad information. During the year, your customers move, street names change, phone numbers change and households break up. This equates to the average 20% deterioration of data quality per annum. Poor data quality will affect your data set and inhibit you to respond and market effectively to customers, thereby affecting your revenue and market share. "If you have standardised data feeding into your data warehouse, you can dramatically improve business intelligence, because data can only effectively be used for analytics when it's cleansed, standardised, validated and enriched," says Julian Ardagh, CEO of Effective Intelligence.
Implement digital marketing tools - Social media has changed from "nice-to-have" to a "must-have" and the majority of markets now have their own brand accounts on social networks, like Google+, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Organisations need to create marketing-purposed digital content and understand that digital marketing tools have channel-specific metrics that can't be easily compared to others. Marketers need to develop a variety of metrics for new digital tools and models that link channel-specific digital metrics to universal metrics.
Focus on ROI - Marketers are in a unique position with big data to change marketing ROI through digital activity. Big data provides marketers with the ability to set the level of metrics required to meet specific measurable objectives. Measurable ROI for big data starts with a clear set of goals and objectives that are accepted by finance.
Ultimately, big data holds the fundamental shift from traditional to technology-powered discipline marketing. And if IDC's prediction for 2013 holds true, 50% of new marketing hires will have technical backgrounds after CMOs realise that they do not have the skill sets in place for data analytics proficiency.
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