As the digital revolution has allowed us to access a broader set of services and communicate without boundaries, it has also shifted the power to the consumers who are now demanding more and better choices in a very competitive market place, putting pressure on businesses to catch up with expectations.
Still, most marketers would prefer to be like Steve Jobs. They take pride in their marketing guts and to follow their instinct, which ultimately makes it hard for them to succeed in the era of Big Data. Having said that, the future of marketing doesn’t simply lie in technology nor in intuition, but the successful integration in both of them; it all boils down to using marketing guts to make proper use of big data. Read more about big data:- Is big data ever going to be for small businesses?
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Out with the old and in with the new
It is safe to say that technology has changed the way we make decisions. We’ve gone from basing our decisions on “scientific” studies and “statistical significance” to predominately relying upon data to tell us what to do. Big data presents unlimited opportunities to marketers but they must know how to use it – there’s no point of having data for the sake of having it. Unless it helps making decisions of any measurable impact, data in itself is rather meaningless. And with the vast volume of data available, many decision makers struggle to turn this into their own advantage and instead become tangled rather than enlightened, and as a result, too much time is consumed on each project that the insight goes stale before it can be used.From IT managers to marketing managers
IT managers used to be the ones dealing with data. However, somewhere over the last few years, marketers have picked up on the fact that such data could provide an unprecedented insight into consumer behaviour, allowing them to tailor campaigns accordingly to have customers coming back time and time again. Read more about marketing campaigns:- 8 great ambush marketing campaigns
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Don’t miss the boat
As a result of big bata insights, more and more brands are prioritising a marketing strategy that’s efficient, effective and connective. With the opportunity of being armed with insights that prove return on investment whilst providing intelligence into sales and customer reactions, today’s CMO should attempt to optimise the marketing engine with digital. Digital is a measurable and targeted way to reach these hyper-connected audiences, who are connected to the web 24/7 and use numerous devices to view online media content.Next steps
For smart marketers, big data presents huge opportunities, so it doesn’t come as a surprise that it’s the marketers that are driving the big data initiative. Know how to interpret and action your insights correctly and you can transform your relationships with customers, keep them coming back and ultimately, boost your bottom line. However, this fundamental shift in marketing can only happen with the use of big data to foster engagement at scale. The world of brand marketing has shifted from brands communicating at people through mass communications, to a world where brands are created, built and amplified to communicate with people through a mass of communicators. Ultimately, big data will enable brand marketers to genuinely understand, measure the impact of, and effectively targeted investments against their efforts to engage in social; and thus allocate meaningful brand marketing money to social engagement initiatives amplified by paid media support. Without a doubt has big data become a vital part of any marketer’s repertoire, but it’s now time to turn it into big action.Glen Westlake is founder and director of Kairos Analytics.
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