There are few reasons behind this, and the biggest one is probably the fact that most people don’t understand how the world of digital marketing works. When you don’t know much about it, the digital marketers’ job may seem dull, complicated or too confusing, but it isn’t so. At its core, this is a creative business opportunity, and once you get to understand how it works, you can seriously step up your advertising and marketing campaigns and expand your online reach. To really make proficient strategies and effective campaigns, digital marketers have to use different tools and approaches to reach out to clients and customers. As the online world works with tons and tons of information, one of the most useful tools for modern-day marketers is the proper analysis of all that data. That’s where big data marketing comes in.
A Virtual Sea of Insights
When you think about old forms of advertising, it becomes clear why the implementation of big data analysis was necessary for the marketing world. Back in the day, you had to do a lot of guessing and blind hoping that specific campaigns will suit most of the focus groups. The research had to be extensive, but it never had any way to show how trends are changing in real time. With the digital era, online marketers finally get all of the data needed to fully understand how their customers and clients feel. The only problem with this is that the sheer amount of data is incredibly overwhelming, and just having so much information won’t help you get what you need if you don’t know how to analyze it.
Major Reasons for Using Big Data
If you’re still not sure what all this data can be used for, here are just some of the key reasons why big data has become irreplaceable in the online marketing world.
Affordable data analytics – there’s a lot of talk about analyzing all that data and understanding what your clients and customers need, and it all sounds too complicated and probably too expensive, right? Wrong. Most of the hosting services now provide different ways of data analytics like DaaS and similar. What’s even more interesting is the fact that most of the hosting services are offering these analytic data services free of charge, which is ideal for small companies. Using past data to determine future – another fantastic thing that marketers got with big data is the fact that all the relevant data is saved so it can be revisited if necessary. This means that marketers can understand what works for them in the past, and why it did, so they can try to recreate the same effect in the future. To achieve the best customer experience, marketers get to tweak the parts that worked in the past, so they reach their goal in an easier fashion. Data visualization – one of the most effective ways for creating a successful marketing campaign is to understand the data, and the best way to do that is by visualizing it. Tools for data visualization help create an actionable insight by helping marketers recognize potential problems and flow issues. They get to address those issues in the best possible way and with the best possible understanding of the matter at hand.
What does it all mean?
Let’s take these reasons and put them into perspective. For example, IBM’s Slam Tracker is used to measure the popularity of tennis players during big events, and it gives viewers a real-time projection of how the internet sees a player at that moment. It analyzes big data, and it provides viewers with useful insight. Another great example of big data usage can be found at online shopping company Gilt Groupe. What they do is analyze patterns and behavior of their visitors, clients, and customers, and through that analysis, they manage to get the necessary data needed for the next step. The next step is adapting the data to 3000 different versions of messages that will be sent out to their customers with specified shopping preferences, sizes, and interests. This way they are keeping their customers updated with relevant material.
Big data sources used for campaign-boosting
The internet grows quickly, and data analyzing is one of the most important things marketers should focus on, according to the professional web developers Sydney offers. With the virtual sea of apps and data analytic sources, some do stand out for their effectiveness.
Social media – almost as big as the internet itself. Millions of users visit social networks on a daily basis, and quite a lot of them spend more than 2.5 hours a day on social media. This allows marketers to gather tons of various data. From personal preferences to brand loyalty, marketers get to track customers and clients through social media and use it to their advantage when they start next campaign. Web mining – automated process of getting data from the web is another thing marketers use quite often. Using certain tools for web mining allows marketers to understand structured as well as unstructured data gathered from their users’ browser activities, server logs, and their site structure. Transactions – tracking transactions that were run through the business will provide marketers with great insights about their clients and customers. Tracking and analyzing those transactions can help them understand the patterns of their users, and plan campaigns accordingly.
All of these aspects should be approached with proper tools. Analyzing great amounts of data to get what you need can be quite challenging if you don’t know how to do it. Here are some of the most used tools in big data analysis today.
Hadoop – This product from Apache is mostly used by large corporations because of its processing power and extensive software library. It gets regularly updated, and it’s amazing for processing large quantities of data. Cloudera – This tool is terrific for creating large data repositories that can be accessed by everyone who needs the data for different purposes. It works excellent with Hadoop, and it provides quite an insight into the world of data analytics. Rapidminer – This tool is mostly used by specialists as an open source platform that works through the principles of visual programming. It allows quite a lot of manipulation, modeling, analyzing and integration of data in business processes and workflows.
As the internet evolves, so do its users. Using big data has become somewhat of a standard, as it is a potent tool when it comes to digital marketing. It has already happened numerous times – a company invested in big data, and after some time they managed to grow quite well. Focusing on the proper analysis of the big data and implementing it into your marketing campaign may require some time and planning, but in the long run – it is one of the best things you can do for your company.
