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A practical guid to real marketing
Why is it important to leave the old ways of analytics and turn to the new?
The original design related to the formation of the traditional marketing platforms eventually narrows down the way they were first designed. The systems such as Data warehouses and CRM systems have been built keeping in mind a very limited set of data. This data mainly includes gender, age, marital status, homeownership, and purchase history, among other things that can be counted to be evaluated by the traditional systems. The variables mentioned above are very slow to show any change, which leads to a very low volume. As a result, the customer profile that emerges from these data management systems is also on pause or not subject to much change.
However, the kind of data available now from the people is very different from what used to be available some years ago. The data that pours in now has a very
volatile quality to it and hence isn't as static as the ones before. Everything that a person does on social media is recorded, from liking posts on social media to having googled something. Everything is stored and is available for interpretation to make marketing analytics better and more efficient. From this description, one can only imagine the type of data that might be pouring in every day, every second, in fact.
The three V’S of big data
VOLUME
The total amount of data to beanalyzed
VELOCITY
The degree to which varioustypes of data are altering
VARIETY
The dissimilar types of data available for examination
What is big data?
How can it be deemed as a revolutionary opportunity?
"Big data" is being termed as something that is spread to a very global extent as a transformative technology trend that is shifting the entire marketing demographic on its axis. Its usefulness for marketers is just as widely spread. The biggest boon of big data is that marketers have the liberty to so much data that is being accessed individually from the customers that they can customize the type of marketing they do and propose changes based on patterns they might observe in the data. This very useful insight has helped thousands of companies improve their product sales by observing the behavior of their customers through the micro-data that they get access to every second. This is
where the usefulness of big data needs to be maximized. Suppose the marketers can deduce helpful information from the data provided to them. In that case, they can essentially change the demographic of the entire company by boosting sales and improving customer relations by a big window. In the long term, it essentially means that they would increase their profits by multifold and pave the path to success.
Ways in which big data helps in a better understanding of customers
Deep customer insight
It is essential to understand the needs, desires, and things that the customer is willing to spend their money on. It is important to analyze the lifecycle they are currently in and then deliver relevant material and supplies to make the experience more personal and authentic.
Finer customer segments
Figure out the pattern created among customers with a similar demographic when it comes to needs and desires and arrange them into a cluster. This would help in the more precise analysis and would yield higher response rates.
Higher customer retention
It is essential to figure out what pushes customers to buy and invest in your company. Is it advertising? Response from another customer that might have shopped from you or are they first-timers and think your company is the ideal choice for them. It is essential to understand the process behind the decision-making that a customer undergoes to reach where they have.
The three V's of big data, as mentioned above, are letting us know about how big a gap or a hole has been created in the world of marketing and media. The usage of big data will help us surpass this hole and divide and speed up the process of marketing and bring it to its absolute best.
Anatomy of a modern marketing analytics solultion
Marketers need to have a storage system where they are allowed to access and store data whenever they need to without any time or storage constraints. Given the amount of data that is being offloaded on companies on a daily basis, it is important to use a storage system that can expand according to the data that it is being fed without any notice or time or help from the IT department. This concept sounds a bit unrealistic and unachievable, but this is the requirement for today's marketing.
Along with the storage issue, marketers also need a platform that gives them the liberty to perform tasks like – dashboarding and advanced
analysis- all of which should be done without the assistance of IT or a data scientist. IT is a sign of an exemplary data analytics platform if the burden of sorting through the data is lifted from the IT department and is placed directly into the hands of the marketers, which leads to the creation of a self-serving environment. Studies show that removing IT from the circle leads to marketers gaining personal insight into the data and cuts the time for data review from weeks into days, which means this method is more efficient and productive.
Requirements of a modern marketing platform
It is important to look at the four key features that we will talk about in this portion of the read. If you pay attention to these four features, you ensure that it can effectively make sense of the big data and make it actionable in your cross-channel campaigns.
Integrated
The marketer must know how to integrate with all the data being poured into the server in real-time and make sense of it on a level that will help him deduce meaningful outputs from the data.
Intuitive
Marketers need to gain the insight to deduce knowledge easily from all the input and output data without help from the IT department. We talked about this before; having to create a self-sufficient environment is very important for the proper functioning of the system and boost productivity.
Elastic
It is very important to have a data storing server that does not need any advance notice before expanding and expands on-demand. This would be time effective since the need to involve the IT department would be completely negated.
Sales Cycle Length Dashboard
Performance There needs to be a system in place, according to which the scale to store and analyze remains vast, all the while not affecting the system performance, which is also very important. It is not sufficient to have a place where a large amount of stuff can be kept, but no algorithms can be performed on that data, or the data cannot be used to deduce relevant information.
Some of the characteristics that are attributed to a traditional analytical system
The primary use for a business analytic system is the business analyst. The data type attributed with the same is static- which means that the data is gathered for demographic and purchase history. The data-ingestion mode is Batch mode. The retention period for the data is around seven to ten years. The data analysis is entirely IT-dependent, and the owner also resides with IT. The data model utilized is the pre-modeled attributes. If these points seem familiar, you must start thinking about the future and develop modern solutions to your very modern problems. This can only happen if you open-heartedly embrace the 'big-data plan.
Finally, to sum up, a reminder that current systems do not allow for the very important V of big data- Variety. It is impossible to anticipate all of the attributes by which the marketer might need to analyze their customer information. Traditional data types also become outdated as soon as the company proposes a minor change in the way they want to approach their marketing problem. It is important to have a myriad of information so that you can always tweak the
information that you gather from the data according to your necessity. Still, it is practically impossible to tweak the data with the traditional systems since it is static and hence does not undergo much change for a long time. You have the liberty to sort through the data and deduce the information you would like to be displayed. A significant advantage of big data is also that the information obtained is constantly changing. Hence no company has to stick with a static plan for their campaigning, and they can easily tweak their strategies and mold it according to the data they are getting.