Big data analytics and data science in marketing provide an organization with several unique opportunities. These opportunities help the organization increase its business and grow its market.
Data mining and analytics tools take information from sources like CRM, digital marketing, emails, sales, social media, market research, and the internet. These tools then make predictions about various outcomes that are the base for various marketing strategies. Presently, many companies use these tools to make successful marketing decisions.
Overview of data analytics
Data analytics or Big Data is characterized by 4V: velocity, volume, veracity, and variety.
Velocity– the term refers to the speed at the data is being generated, stored in servers, analyzed by the relevant experts, and utilized by companies and businesses.
Volume– the term refers to the amount of total size of the data.
Veracity– the term refers to data uncertainty. Veracity is the data’s accuracy, quality, and trustworthiness.
Variety– the term refers to the various data sources and data types. Presently, data is collected from sources like apps, wearables, smartphones, social media, IoT-enabled devices, and emails.
The need for big data analytics in today’s digital marketing strategy
Data analytics provides context and meaning to the data collected. Analytics examines the data to discover correlations, insights, patterns, and trends. Without that, the data is simple ones and zeroes and has no business value. Hence, applying analytics to big data helps companies understand their audience better. Of course, the process itself involves scrutinizing data sets and gaining insights into what they contain. These insights vary from future trends to customer behavior.
The immediate benefit of analyzing information stored in big data is that businesses can make informed decisions. Undoubtedly, these decisions influence marketing campaign launches and launching a new service or product to the public.
Data analytics can include confirmatory data analysis and extrapolatory data analysis. These processes, therefore, find whether an assumption on a specific data set is true. Another distinction is quantitative data analysis, which is vastly different from qualitative data analysis.
Ways Big Data Analysis supports digital marketing strategies
Getting the right data
The first and obvious advantage of big data analysis is that it provides the essential data required to make effective marketing decisions. Do note that too much data can also harm a marketing strategy. Evidently, the best approach is to first focus on KPIs or Key Performance Indicators and work backward from there. KPIs represent measurable values that provide insight into a campaign’s performance. As a result, this data can guide a marketing team in making the right decisions.
Some examples of KPIs for measuring marketing performance are site visitors, landing page visitors, email collections, clicks, and registrations to name a few. Regardless of the campaign’s goal, KPIs support reaching the objective.
Data analytics gains insight into audience and channels
Undoubtedly, the best thing about big data is it tells you who you should be targeting in your marketing campaigns and who to approach. The ability to track the type of visitors that come to your site helps you build a persona for your audience. Then, you can aim for other people similar to the present customer base. You can use data to understand the things your customers interact with on your site and marketing campaigns.
A good way to decide on your target audience is to determine their intent. This approach also relates to using KPIs when making content decisions that fit the audience’s taste. A notable example of an important data set is to consider the traffic sources from devices. Different demographics use various methods of accessing online marketing information. Hence, having the right channels to reach the audience can significantly impact your digital marketing campaigns.
In 2018, 48% of site visits came from mobile devices. Knowing the devices your target audience uses most helps you optimize your content. That way you can efficiently reach your audience.
Target the right keywords
Big data analysis reveals what type of product or service the target audience is looking for. This analysis helps you target specific keywords and drive the traffic to your channels. The amount of data provided by tools like Google AdWords Keyword helps you determine potential keywords to focus on. It is also possible to use this to see which keywords the competition is using and which ones are missing.
Using keywords for more than ad targeting can drive your business forward. You can insert keywords into your social media marketing, your call-to-action button, content marketing, and other content-specific areas. Additionally, it is essential to regularly analyze and monitor results. That way you can optimize the strategy.
Website and campaign optimization
You can use past data to predict the outcome of upcoming marketing campaigns. You can study the performance of past ad-targeting strategies and marketing campaigns with big data. This approach helps you pinpoint which approaches work and the strategies that did not. For example, if your Google ads out-perform the Facebook ads, take it as a sign to increase the budget for Google. Additionally, you can optimize your campaigns to different demographics within the target audience.
Showing return on investment
Stakeholders want to know that their investments are yielding the appropriate results. Digital marketing helps a company show exactly how much they spent on marketing campaigns and their effect on the profit margin. In any data set, the actionable items like a form or a click must be accounted for. Knowing which channel is driving the most traffic helps you add tracking parameters to the URLs. That way, you can relocate digital spending and get better results.
Do note that when you list phone numbers on a site, it is essential to have a way to track those interactions. You can track them through customer service or a system. The correct approach to data analysis accelerates your marketing efforts.
Wrapping up
In conclusion, data analytics and customer analysis can guide your business goals, marketing strategies, and products to engage and retain customers. That way, you can capture their loyalty for the long term. Insights from data gathered in real-time create value for your customers and result in a better ROI.
Presently, it is good practice for any company to make decisions based on facts and data. The effective use of analytics and data helps marketing teams stay anchored to their consumer’s changing trends. That way you can create quality content and increase engagement with your target audience.
