Top Ways To Effectively Leverage Big Data To Improve Your Marketing.

Before diving into the deep end, let's make sure we're ready to swim without the ol' water wings. It's critical to understand the difference between good old fashion regular data and “big data”. As you can imagine, this is a fairly common and relevant question for most companies doing business online.

“Big data” refers to the voluminous amounts of data that businesses typically collect from their own company processes and from their customers through different means. When leveraged correctly, the use of big data can reveal incredibly valuable trends and patterns that can lead to profitable improvements in how you execute key components of your corporate growth strategy, including but not limited to, your marketing strategy. You've no doubt read and heard about the promise of big data for quite some time, and perhaps you've employed some type of big data strategy, or like many businesses, still trying to come to better understand how what strategy can you employ to ensure meaningful results that prove to actually move the needle.

We wanted to avoid boiling the ocean in hopes of helping prompt you further to taking action or improving on your existing big data practices. Our goal of this post is to equip you with some easy to use, ready to go tactics you can immediately leverage in support of bettering the overall effectiveness of your marketing. Sound good?

Our first recommendation is to centralize and synthesize the stove piped sources of customer data from across point-of-sale systems, e-commerce platforms, mobile applications and social accounts with data management technologies. This step may seem daunting, yet it doesn't have to be. Avoid the compelling pull to try to get any and all data sources - as it's just not necessary at this point. Target only customer data that will help you reach your top goals. Doing so will likely require I.T. and a few other resources, yet it's a worthy pursuit. Why? Because you're working towards establishing a single source of customer truth. That's to say, your marketing team will be working from a single, synthesized data set, which if nothing else affords your marketing team a unprecedented, holistic view of their customers based on their purchases, interactions and preferences. This, in turn, provides powerful intelligence to drive advanced segmentation, sophisticated personas and strategic, targeted campaigns to engage and motivate consumers