For people in marketing, it’s impossible not to have heard of Big Data before.
However, you may not be totally sure about what it is, and how it can impact you and your work. What’s important to know is that it can really change the way that you market to your audience.
Here’s some of the best ways you can use big data to make a real impact.
Personalise Your E-commerce
E-commerce has totally changed the way people shop, and you want to make sure that your customers can find you and your products. When you have access to Big Data, you can ensure that you’re reaching your audience in the most efficient way possible.
When you use analytics, you can predict user preferences, offer recommendations, and more. For example, many businesses are using data to optimise their pricing. This allows them to analyse marketing data, sales history, and company accounts to see what the best price is. That should allow you to bring in more customers and get maximum profit.
There are companies out there that have used data to bring a more personal shopping experience to their customers. Shopify suggests that E-commerce sites use something called product-detail page (PDP) recommendations to guide shoppers to the products that are based on their browsing history, locations, and more.
For example, take Very, which uses real time data to personalise the experience their shoppers have. It uses the weather data from the customers’ location, and uses that to recommend outfits from the store. Hot weather will result in recommendations for summery clothes, while wet and cold weather will offer them sweaters and raincoats. On top of this, the banner at the top of the page will show the shopper’s name, when they visit the site to browse.
These details are small on the face of it, but they will ensure that customers feel valued, and are seeing products that are relevant to them.
Create More Relevant Content
Content marketing has been one of the best ways to bring in more leads for a while, allowing you to give your audience the content that they’re looking for. When putting resources into your content marketing, you should look into your data to improve what you’re offering.
It’s so vital that you’re customising that content to meet your customers’ needs. With so many companies out there competing for your attention, you need to be on the ball and bring something new and interesting.
You can look at Coca Cola to see what they can offer their customers. They pay close attention to their customer data, so they can improve marketing all the time. ‘They focus on things like social media mentions, customer service channels, and more‘ says Fiona Marron, a business writer from Lia Help and Paper Fellows. ‘That allows them to get a closer look at what their customers are looking for.’
Improve Marketing Budget Allocation
There are more marketing channels out there than ever before. Because of this, you need to take great care in selecting the right channels for your business. It’s not easy though, as buyers are often moving through different channels, and you can’t quite pinpoint where they’re buying from.
You can do more though, with Big Data. You can get a closer look at how those marketing channels work, and understand where you’re getting the most value. With this in mind, you can start allocating more cash to the marketing channels that are working more for you.
Marketing blogger James Rainier from Boom Essays and Essayroo says, ‘AdriaCamps are a good example of using big data to understand where to place your marketing budget. They understood that they could focus on SEO and email marketing, which led to 66% more bookings overall‘.
When you know where that money should be spent, then you’ll get better results.
More Effective Marketing Testing
When planning any kind of marketing campaign, you need to test out your plan to see how it will work. In the past, this hasn’t been an exact science and so there were always holes that you wouldn’t find, until you set it into motion.
Businesses are now using Big Data to test out marketing plans more thoroughly. You can test out multiple variations of a plan, and get data and ideas to see what will happen. It’s so useful to have such data, as you can get much more from your marketing with it.
That’s something you’ll see from iCloud, which uses Big Data analytics to understand it’s marketing funnel. It took a look at how their customers had to interact with their site, in order to interact with their latest marketing efforts.
With that information, they found the step where customers often abandoned a purchase, and made improvements to reduce that number and increase their revenue.
Target Advertising Better
You’ll always be trying to market your business to the right audience, and Big Data can help you improve your efforts here. As you have access to data on what your audience do and where they spend time online, you can target your advertising more effectively.
You can see The Weather Co. doing this with their marketing. They’ve seen a 10% sales increase in certain products, after they’ve used customer location data to recommend products to people in certain climates.
Conclusion
There are so many ways Big Data can improve your marketing strategy. With these 5 strategies, you’ll be on your way to improving your marketing schemes for the better!
Start analysing your data, and see where you can start making improvements in your marketing today!
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Christina Lee is a project manager for Essay service and Academized. She focuses on marketing news and technologies, for them and services like Ox Essays.