In marketing circles, data is king. It’s the raw material for successful targeting within any great marketing campaign. It’s the secret ingredient for gaining actionable insights to help drive sales. Marketers can’t get enough of Big Data, and it’s a well-known fact that mobile operators are sat on a goldmine of customer data based on presence, location and preference. By using data captured from their network, operators can discover what websites their customers’ visit, which applications they use and what products they buy.
As businesses strive to adopt intimate relationships with their customers, mobile is seen as the key to unlocking some of the greatest insights into the real-life habits of customers. Where else could you discover a customer’s precise location, their preference for certain services, as well as their lifestyle patterns, in real-time from a single data transaction? As this information is enriched with demographic data, the mobile platform offers unparalleled insight into customer profiling. By providing details of online activity and interaction with applications and social media sites, data taken from a mobile network holds the key to offering relevant lifestyle products and services to increase ARPU and reduce churn.
Yet ‘Big Data’ isn’t a new concept. Mobile operators have always had to contend with Big Data – a cross section of information stored in disparate silos and data warehouses – but the more data customers generate, the greater the complexity. Information that is essential to the smooth running of a mobile network is also of immense value for marketing functions, brands and organisations. This data stream is growing all the time, as customers are no longer passively receiving content and information, but now actively engaging with it. By registering with new websites, downloading applications, videos and games, they provide operators with stronger lifestyle clues than ever before. This interaction between the user and the operator has become equivalent to a conversation and operators now have a better insight into their customers’ choices than even perhaps Google or Amazon. Why? Because it’s mobile.
However, while Big Data and actionable intelligence derived from the mobile world represents a huge opportunity, it also presents two key challenges. Firstly, operators need to get a handle on this two-way data stream. In its raw form, there is very little value derived from the mass of data fragments operators receive from mobile users. Only by distilling and enriching it, one layer at a time, can they make sense of the value and transform those bits and bytes into actionable intelligence that will benefit third parties and marketers. Secondly, they need to guarantee the accuracy and quality of these complex data sets. By using data to see trending patterns, operators can start to ask ‘why is this happening?’ Taking that information a stage further, the answers to questions like ‘what will happen and when?’ will become more predictable. By getting ahead of the curve, operators can capitalise on the real monetary value of Big Data and make decisions that will optimise the outcome, not just for themselves, but for interested third parties as well.
By utilising Big Data, operators are able to monetise their assets by extending their outreach to market research services, collaborating with third parties in sectors such as retail and events, promoting targeted advertising and driving third person service creation. This approach has been combined with another key, and unique, mobile asset – location. By configuring data from across the network and combining that with the location of groups of customers mobile operators can deliver marketing and promotion campaigns using location-based services (LBS). This process of LBS is Big Data in its purest and most valuable form. Real-time data is of enormous value to retailers, restaurants and bars, for example. Marketing messages, promotional teasers and discounted coupons can be sent to the right set of customers, in the right location and the right time of day, influencing buying decisions and creating more meaningful relationships between brands and end-users. For example, a retailer generated a 20% sales increase over a three-week period using LBS (9% was directly traceable to the SMS component). Individual responses were exceptional – 82% of SMS respondents came into a store and made a purchase, usually on the day of receiving a message. Another project, undertaken by a European coffee franchise, delivered 50,000 SMS messages. With 50 cents charged per targeted text, it generated $1.3 million of incremental revenue for the mobile operator per year.
Operators can communicate with their customers based on real-time user behaviour, providing them with highly personalised and relevant service offerings. Not only will operators they have new upsell and cross-sell opportunities at the customer level, they will also be in a position to broker anonymous data to third party organisations without contravening privacy and data protection legislation.
By utilising and understanding the mass of data crossing their networks, operators will be in a strong position to monetise customer trends and interests, yet too few know the true value of unlocking Big Data in a joined up, organised and consistent way. This not only enables operators to improve their understanding of the customer experience and activity across their network, but also provides the opportunity to adopt a true one-to-one approach to marketing.
By Lyn Cantor, President and CEO of Tektronix Communications.
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