Data has gained relevance in almost every sphere of business activity. In this article, we will discuss the key aspects of how data influences the digital marketing space.
You perhaps have not yet realized that data bears the capability to guide the strategic efforts of marketing. With data, marketers can understand their target audience to run personalized campaigns.
During the last few years, big data has gained importance as the business world shifted to a digital environment.
Today, all businesses need to understand what Big Data is and how it can help you run successful digital marketing campaigns and maximize RoI.
What is Big Data?
The concept of big data is simple. You can regard it as a large volume of structured and unstructured information that a business receives daily.
The importance of big data arises not from the amount but from how businesses organize the data to figure out the actions, needs, wants, and buying habits of their consumers.
Volume, Velocity, Variety, and Veracity are the classifications of big data.
Volume
Volume is the amount of data that gets collected from a variety of different sources. The sources can be social media, online forms, online transactions, machine-to-machine data, etc.
As the number of consumer characteristics has multiplied manifold, the volume of structured and unstructured data also has grown substantially. As, such, the traditional methods of handling data no longer works properly.
New and advanced methods have come up today with which businesses can easily process big data.
Velocity
The speed at which data gets generated, stored, analyzed, and archived is called velocity. Businesses should ensure that appropriate methods are available to handle the inflow of data.
Variety
The different forms of data that a business receives is called variety. As data comes from different sources, the construction will be different. Depending on the sources, data can be structured or unstructured. Variety also depends on the format, like videos, written documents, images, etc.
Veracity
The discrepancies and noise in the data are called veracity. Businesses should ensure that they do not store any irrelevant information which can negatively impact any analysis. Data has to be meaningful to be fit for analysis.
Influence of Big Data on Digital Marketing
With big data, businesses can get the insights they need to understand their target audience, big data has become an integral part of any digital marketing strategy.
Big data can help organize data, segment the market and create consumer personas based on characteristics such as behaviours, purchase patterns, hobbies, geolocation, etc. Moreover, it helps to improve the user experience.
As such, it eliminates all the guesswork and thus is an effective marketing method.
Big Data helps digital marketing in the following ways:
Consumer Insights
Interpretation of data has become a crucial component of executing marketing strategies in todays digital age.
Big data helps to elicit customer insights in real-time. Therefore, marketers can understand the tastes and preferences of their target audience.
When businesses interact with consumers through social media, they can figure out what consumers expect from them.
You can therefore structure your digital marketing campaign to distinguish it from that of your competitors.
Personalisation
In todays competitive business landscape, businesses cannot escape personalization. Big data can help businesses personalize their digital marketing campaigns. With the knowledge of consumer insights, businesses can understand the tastes and preferences, so they can structure their digital marketing campaigns in a targeted and personalized manner.
Digital marketing is all about delivering the right message at the right time. Targeted emails and ads can help to personalize digital marketing campaigns.
With targeted emails, businesses can create a stronger bond with their consumers. Email marketing can help marketers create more personalised and effective campaigns by delivering the right message. Businesses
Businesses can target these emails through browsing history, behaviours, purchasing history, etc.
Big data can help businesses create more effective targeted ads. Marketers can use third party sources to display ads to users. As a result, businesses can increase brand awareness, revenues and brand loyalty.
Boost Sales
With big data, businesses can predict the demand for a product or service. The information on user behaviour can help businesses to answer many types of questions, such as what types of product consumers buy, how often they purchase or search for a product or service and what payment methods they prefer using.
Obviously, every visitor to your website will not make a purchase. So, if businesses have answers to the questions, they can create a seamless user experience and identify and target users pain points.
Campaign Efficiency
Big data can bring more efficiency to digital marketing campaigns, and at the same time, optimize your costs.
Digital marketers should always have answers to the following questions, regarding their target audience:
- Who is the contact?
- When will be the prospect available to contact?
- How will they contact the prospect?
- What should they offer to the contact?
When markers have answers to these questions, they can segment their target audience and construct predictive models to predict future behaviours.
Also, when markers know when the users will be online in their preferred platforms, they can target customers in their familiar digital environment. So, they can focus on platforms with high levels of conversions. Asa result, they can see increased revenue and hence higher RoI. Also, they can manage their budgets in a better way.
Analyse Campaign Results
Measurement of your digital marketing campaign is essential to figure out the results. And with big data, you can easily measure the performance of your campaign.
Marketers can use reports to determine the presence of any negative changes to marketing KPIs. If they detect any deviation from achieving the desired results, they can re-orient their marketing strategy. As such, they can maximise revenue and make the marketing efforts more scalable.
Conclusion
Big data has eventually made inroads into the digital marketing sphere. And it has become a crucial part of all business strategies. You should know effective ways to target your audience on digital channels. Also, you should structure your content based on the right keywords and user information. And the result will be an increase in the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaign, and hence an increase in your RoI.
