How Big Data Is Changing The Landscape of Digital Marketing?

Big Data: Transforming the Digital Marketing Strategy

A successful Digital marketing campaign involves handling huge data for better understanding of audience and to target right audience at the right time and at the right place. This involves an understanding of huge data sets, commonly referred as Big data for efficient and effective Digital marketing strategy. This shows the direct relationship between Big Data and Digital marketing. Before learning more about their relationship and interdependence. Let's learn more about Big data, its foundation, and various aspects. 

What is Big Data?

Today, The data on the web is growing day by day at a rapid pace. Systems/Enterprises generate a huge amount of Data from Terabytes to Petabytes of information. This is impossible to maintain such large data sets on traditional databases. This arises the need of a fast and reliable mechanism known as Big Data.

           

Big Data is the term for a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using traditional data bases management tools or data processing applications.

In simple words, Big Data is a term used for large collection of data typically Petabytes or Terabytes. 

In May 2012, Danah Boyd and Kate Crawford published "Critical questions for big data in information, communication, and society ". They define Big Data as "A cultural, technological and scholarly phenomenon that rests on the interplay of technology, analysis, and mythology."

The four V's of Big Data

There are specific attributes that define big data these are called the four V's namely:

Volume: Scale of Data

The main characteristic that makes the data "Big Data" is its huge volume. It makes no sense to focus on minimum storage units because the total amount of information is growing exponentially. The world’s information is doubled every two years. By 2020, the world will generate 50 times the amount of information. To handle this huge amount of data, one needs to have sufficient storage units. Otherwise, there is no point in focusing on big data technologies.

Variety: forms of Data

Variety is the most interesting thing about the big data. Data on the web is available in many forms as we have already discussed, People upload videos, take pictures on their cell phones, text friends, update their Facebook status, leave comments around the web, click on ads, post tweets on the twitter, and so on.

Web data may be classified  three categories:

1.Structured Data: this category has data mainly from relational databases such as data from Enterprises Systems.

2.Unstructured Data: this is mainly streaming data such as Text messages, Videos, Images, Audio messages etc.

3.Semi-Structured Data: It contains data from XML files, e-mail body etc.

Velocity: Data in motion

Velocity is the frequency of the incoming data that needs to be processed. As we already know, that the amount of data is so huge and it is exploding every minute of every day. By the end of 2017, it is predicted that there will be more than 20 billion network connections and you can imagine the data flow due to these huge number of connections. 

Veracity: Uncertainty of Data

Veracity refers to the trustworthiness of the data. It depicts uncertainty of data. According to reports, One of the three Business leaders doesn't  trust the information they use to make decisions.

Where it came from ??  - The Foundation of Data Innovation

How data became Big?  

The story started seventy years before when the first attempts to quantify the data which was popularly known as "Information explosion". This was the first milestone in the field of sizing data volumes and in the evolution of the idea of "Big Data". 

"But if big data has been around for so long, why do we suddenly keep hearing about it now? Well, as the old metaphor explains, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and it is no longer just science that is exploiting this. The fact that we can derive more knowledge by joining related information together and spotting correlations can inform and enrich numerous aspects of everyday life, such as traffic or financial conditions, in short-term evolutions, such as medical, or in predictive situations, such as business, crime or disease trends. Virtually every field is turning to gathering big data." Lesson by Tim Smith.

Big Data and Digital Marketing: 

Big Data and Digital Marketing are interdependent on each other. A successful marketing campaign must implement big data for better targeting and improved conversion rate.Using Big data in Digital marketing strategy offers many benefits which can make your marketing strategy effective and efficient. Few of the benefits are discussed as follows:

• Target Customers: Online data is the fuel that powers any successful digital marketing campaign. The data can involve the consumer names and their personal details from their previous online history or preferences. Using this data can increase the conversion rate as they are potential customers.   

• Retargeting: Online data is not only useful for targeting potential customers but for targeting the existing customers as well. retargeting involves to targets customers based on their website visits by using various big data analytics tools.

• Experience Personalization: The customized experience can be given to the regular customers on their visits by implementing big data analytics tools. Big data can let businesses to present their regular customers with the customized pages based on their previous orders and clicks. The use of personalization to create emails specific to a customer's interests is the future of traditional email marketing which most of the times spams users. 

• Customized Paid Campaigns: Advanced analytics will also give the digital marketers the option to be more selective about paid online marketing efforts. Before starting a new campaign, they can use the demographics data obtained from Google Analytics and other tools to target the right audience.

• Marketing Personas: The customer profile created through studying analytics will increasingly be used to create buyer personas ( Fictional characters represent specific users of a website ), which ensures each marketing effort is oriented towards a specific type of customer.

• Specific Marketing Messaging: Not only do marketers have access to more data about customers, your customers also now have much more choice on information they receive. Digital marketers can save their time by marketing products to the customers interested in by studying the data analytics.  

• Real time Customer Insights: Analysis of data using data analytics tools means that marketing teams are better equipped to respond to consumer demands and change in habits, preferences, income and other data for complete better customer experience.

Usage of Big Data in Digital Marketing: The Debate is still on

The importance of Big data in making effective and efficient marketing strategy is the hottest topic of debate among the marketing experts. 

Although, Big data has various benefits discussed above which show a direct relationship between the two. some experts believe that big data has nothing to do with the digital marketing campaigns and It makes the strategy more complexed to understand and implement. 

But, This is not a valid point. Let's look at the following example to illustrate this: 

Consider a hotel or a restaurant, From check in to check off of a customer produces a lot of data, like customer information, orders, payment method details etc. This multiplied by the number of simultaneous check-ins and check-offs the hotel has all over a city or the country if combined together produces large sets of data.

The same chain of hotels uses all the data from previous stays/check-ins of customers and pushes its marketing campaigns to those customers first who are regular visitors and are more likely conversions. This data helps hotel owner save a lot on marketing and the benefit is transferred to customers. Unlike any other Digital marketer who doesn't make use of this data, ends up spending more and not so desired results.

This example clearly shows that big data and digital marketing are dependent on each other and using big data analytics tools can make your digital marketing campaigns efficient and effective.