Marketers have always been at the forefront of data usage, and they are well enmeshed in the power of big data – they have to be, to compete.
All brands, big or small, can benefit from the common advantages of big data. They are able, for example, depending on the data they track, to analyse campaign revenue based on market opportunity data; track key campaign metrics and view overall performance as a funnel; analyse geographical buying behaviour based on product types; and drill down to specific account detail by using demographic filters and search. These provide powerful insights that enable marketers to target localities or specific audiences with powerfully individualised messages, offers or pricing.
Big data is important to marketers because it generally offers new levels of granularity and insight, enabling brands to target campaigns more effectively. For example, if we were a beverage marketer, in the past we might have been able to discover sales by category for a particular day of the week and therefore know to sell more drinks on Sunday in a particular region. With big data, we can uncover incredibly detailed patterns – like sales by item by hour, minute and even second. Now we can market decaf cappuccinos from 2pm to 3pm Sundays for the post-brunch crowd at our downtown store and at the same time know to offer sodas in the suburban store. But big data doesn’t have to be intimidating – it just has to be accessible and easy to ask questions of. It’s critical that marketers understand and see the patterns so the data can be used to empower business critical decisions. Software tools help with this.
Marketers can use big data to help model and predict demand with much greater accuracy than ever before. These are still predictions though, only as good as the data the marketers start with – so a strong focus on data suitability and reliability is essential if deep insights that can help form predictions are to be created. With more data insight comes greater consumer understanding, and brands can use this to really fine tune their offers to very narrow segments of consumers based on a wide variety of variables.
Big data is an extension of traditional data analysis. The differences lie in the technology we employ to manage it and extract those insights. In this respect, digital data has made a huge difference. You can’t stand in an online store and watch customers walk around. The visibility you have is in the web logs. By looking at those, we not only see what customers are doing, we see more than a regular retailer can about intent, decision making and loyalty. Big data, fuelled by digitisation, is an extension to the marketer’s toolkit. In the future, savvy brands will continue to seek ever finer insights, and as long as the data and insights leads to better decision making then brands will make use of it in ever more inventive ways.
By Elissa Fink, Chief Marketing Officer of Tableau Software.
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