How Data Can Elevate Your Efforts in Digital Marketing

According to a survey published on Forbes Insights paper, as many as 92% of companies using Big Data – for more than half of their marketing campaigns – exceeded their marketing goals. The report also states that companies using Big Data analytics have recorded an impressive lift of 8-23% in their annual sales.

Clearly, Data helps.          

As a digital marketer, are you using Big Data efficiently for your marketing campaigns? Let us understand what Big Data is and how it can help you reap maximum benefits out of your digital marketing campaigns.

What is Big Data? Why Do You Need it?

Traditional marketing on different mediums typically involved capturing sales numbers on a spreadsheet and examining them manually for any insights.

This involved a lot of guess and experimentation work hoping that the insights would click with what the target customer wants from the brand. Researches, no matter how extensive they were, could never capture real-time trends.

However, as the era of digital marketing kicked in, you, as the digital marketer, can now collect and store all the valuable insights needed to understand what your customers want.

But that leaves your marketing team to deal with an overwhelming amount of data – that can be both complex and unstructured. In order to derive useful information from this data, you need tools that can structure and analyze the data.

So, how do Big Data tools help digital marketers?

Essentially, in simple terms, Big Data is all about generating and analysing large volumes of data. By analysing complex datasets, it derives rich and informative information and allows you to understand your customer needs and plan the right marketing initiatives.

Here is how Big Data can help you plan your success in digital marketing:

Personalize your marketing

With Big Data, you can create personalized marketing campaigns for your target audience. Also known as one-on-one marketing, personalized marketing is all about showing relevant ads or messages to individual customers based on previous data such as browsing history, clickstream behavior, age, geolocation, and so on.

Apart from saving money and increasing ad efficiency, personalized marketing can enhance your customer’s brand experience, promote brand loyalty, and increase online sales and conversion.

The online content streaming platform, Netflix is a brilliant example of how to use targeted advertising. Netflix uses your past movie searches to get insights on what interests you the most and suggest what you should watch next.

The effectiveness of the targeted advertising can be gauged from the fact that 80% of the content watched on Netflix is influenced by this recommended system.

Here are a few ways you can use Big Data to personalize marketing campaigns for your customers:

Develop a buyer persona.

With Big Data, you can remove all the guesswork from understanding your customer needs. Big Data models help you design the right buyer persona – using parameters like customer behaviour, buying patterns, favorite product lines, and so on. For example, you may find that working women respond better to product promotion email, while millennials are likely to take interest in discount offers or promotions.

Harvest the right customer insights from social networks.

With online users spending an average of 2 hours 22 minutes each day on social networking sites, this is the right platform for online businesses to target. Based on the most frequent searches and posted comments, you can match each social media user to a digital persona – to target them with the right marketing message.

Optimize your marketing budget across digital mediums

Which digital channel should you invest for your next online campaign? With so many digital mediums, such as social media, blogs, AdWords, and affiliate networks, this is one of the major challenges for marketers.

Big Data can help you determine which channels are bringing in more traffic and which are creating more sales opportunities – thus enabling you to use your budget smartly by investing in channels that work and ignoring those with poor click-through rates.

Here are a few tips to optimize your digital marketing budget:

1. Use the Pareto principle.

Also known as the 80/20 rule, you can now use the Pareto principle to identify the top 20% of your digital mediums that are generating 80% of positive results. You can include incoming traffic from various sources including paid marketing campaigns, organic traffic, and social media campaigns to determine your budget allocation.

2. Do not scale your budget until you see profitability.

Start with small budget allocation and target only a few digital mediums – until you see profitability. Budget scaling can either mean different online campaigns on a single medium or on multiple mediums. By starting on a small scale, you can easily identify the digital mediums that work for you – and accordingly, make the right budgeting decision.

Conclusion

Using Big Data, you can increase the ROI of your marketing campaign by targeting a purchase-ready customer by anticipating their needs in advance. You can easily convert potential customers into loyal clients by using unique data sources in the ways discussed above and much more.

Do you want to explore ways of integrating your data and derive valuable marketing insights? We can help you – book a demo with us today!

‍