Over the last few years, Big Data has been all the rage with marketing teams worldwide. A recent survey carried out by the market research institute, GFK for the Guardian, “86 percent of marketers consider that big data will change the function of marketing, and a further 62 percent say that it has already fundamentally changed their role.”
While it’s true that big data is revolutionizing the marketing world, simply collecting big data isn’t enough; you have to know how to use the data that you collect in order to see results. Below are three ways that you can make the most out of the Global Big Data Market:
1. Social Media
Recently, social media have been a major data source for many organizations. This is because of their ability to provide instant feedback about the businesses through blogs and social networking sites. With the rapid increase in the number of social media, there is high demand to track user interactions on these sites.
Additionally, the increased importance of sentiment analysis and advancements in text analytics are encouraging organizations to include social media in their business process. Social media increase the amount of data in enterprises.
That being said, merely having a social media presence is probably not going to cut it; especially considering that the majority of businesses worldwide have use social media. The key to harnessing big data to improve social media is to remember that not all data is useful. The trick is to find creative ways to interact with consumers to find out more about them.
For example, one of the most successful social media marketing campaigns to gain consumer feedback is the “Old Spice Man Responses” phenomenon. We’ve all seen the commercials featuring Isaiah Mustafa’s as “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like”. Old Spice uploaded over 180 videos to YouTube over two days while also responding to user comments mirroring the eccentric humour featured in the commercials which made the campaign go viral in a matter of days.
2. Near Field Communication
By using Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, vendors can enhance the payment process by providing value-added services such as couponing, loyalty programs, advertising, and digital gifts. In addition, NFC-based payments are attractive for both merchants and customers, as this is a new technology with several factors, such as reliability, how essential it is perceived to be, security, and user friendliness that need to be addressed.
This year, in partnership with the mobile commerce company Proxama, Guinness initiated a new marketing campaign by equipping over 14,000 drink dispensers with NFC capabilities in pubs and bars across the UK, eventually upgrading around 65,000 founts by 2015. With this technology, consumers can tap their smartphone against the NFC-enabled harp on ‘magic behind the gates’ Guinness founts to see if they have won a complimentary pint of Guinness.
“NFC technology in smartphones is starting to play a key role in how brands and consumers engage. Guinness is leading the field with NFC as a brand engagement technology. The first drinks brand to market with the technology and at scale. Deploying the technology to the whole Guinness estate demonstrates how influential Diageo (Guinness’ parent company) sees NFC in supporting mobile marketing and consumer engagement. Brands get very few opportunities to have meaningful one-to-one interactions with their consumers; NFC is changing this by allowing brands to interact with consumers that have proactively chosen to engage with them.” Says Miles Quitmann, Managing Director at Proxama.
3. Analysis for Future Predictions
Big data tools and solutions are capable of performing in-depth analysis on historical data with various statistical techniques in order to make predictions about the future. With the help of big data, organizations are able to find trends in data collected and therefore identify risks and opportunities.
Volumes of structured and unstructured data are considered in order to capture a relationship among many factors that would help organizations assess how a customer is likely to react in a given specific situation. This helps companies frame an effective marketing strategy to improve customer experience and ultimately boost sales. Therefore, the ability to accurately predict the future is the major driver of the adoption of big data by global enterprises.
Netflix is one example of a company that uses big data analysis to predict future patterns. In 2008, Netflix faced a major service outage that left some customers without service for three days. That gave Netflix the incentive to harness big data to improve their service to prevent future outages.
Currently, Netflix uses big data to improve quality and stability for video streams as well as to evaluate customer preferences by recommending show or movies they might like to see. Those efforts have proven a vital importance to the company, which is now the worldwide leader in Internet television, offering over one billion hours of TV shows and movies per month to over 37 million members in 40 countries.
As you can see, big data can be the difference maker between a successful marketing campaign and one that goes virtually unnoticed. The trick is to know how to use the data that your company collects and to channel it accordingly. The above examples are the tip of the iceberg in terms of the ways that companies can harness big data to improve operations, which is why we’ve predicted that the Global Big Data Market will grow at a CAGR of over 55 percent by the year 2015.
For more information, view our 2011-2015 Global Big Data Market report.
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Global Hadoop-as-a-service Market 2012-2016
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Interactive Mobile and Social Media Marketing Spend in the US 2012-2016
