How BI Can Help Shape Your Marketing Strategy
Digital marketing is a discipline that is rapidly evolving; that’s because the Web itself is changing faster than ever. We’re nearing the realization of Web 3.0 – The Semantic/Intelligent Web – thanks to the mountains of data pouring out of new devices, products, and social platforms every second of every day.
As a result, marketers need to understand how this deluge of data impacts content & community marketing strategies.
Grabbing a customer's attention is no easy feat with the amount of noise businesses need to compete with. So more and more marketers are getting savvy with customer data to find, target, and engage their customers in a way that’s more personal and relevant.
Marketing can no longer take a “one size fits all” approach to communicating with potential customers, so using relevant business data to inform marketing strategy and customer targeting enables businesses to better nudge individual customers along their journey.
Consumers want their services to be personalized and automatic, big data offers marketers context for personalizing their communication to customers in real time. For example, if a home owner has a broken sprinkler, they’re going to research how to fix it, or how to replace it and which sprinkler to use in its place. This is the moment when home improvement sites can use BI to engage the customer, knowing exactly the right platform and time to do so.
It’s time to do away with Millennials. Not as people, but as a category. Lumping customers into a demographic based on their age or location is a marketing tactic that doesn’t need to exist anymore. Business Intelligence allows marketers to create hyper-local content for specific consumers, catering exactly to what they need at the time when they need it, regardless of age, sex or location.
As companies start using big data, they will also stop relying on what has so far been a cornerstone of most customer insights programs — namely endless surveys and focus groups that purport to explain customers’ motivations and attitudes but in reality add very little strategic value.
Transitioning to a big data focused campaign isn’t always easy. It requires changing practices, sometimes hiring new people, and allocating funds away from familiar ways of doing things. But there are business intelligence platforms, like BIME, out there that make it easy to process all the information accruing, and once you’ve seen the power of real data, you’ll question if it’s worth still spending all of that money on surveys and focus groups.
A recent study by Enterprise Management Associates and Dell surveyed 351 business and technology stakeholders around the world to illuminate key trends surrounding the adoption, expectations, and challenges associated with Big Data initiatives. It found that marketing as a field uses data analysis more than any other function. This means that due to the need, the market for big data tools catered to marketers are increasing as well. Soon every campaign will be derived from big data, and if you aren’t incorporating it in some form, then you’re bound to be left in the dust.
With the shift in the importance of marketing tools comes a shift in skillsets as well. Previously, a strong background in sales and marketing came from years of experience and a good understanding of specific markets. Now that big data is in the picture, a valuable marketing employee is one who has a strong grasp of business intelligence and maybe even a background in data analysis.