5 Ways Big Data is Making an Impact on Digital Marketing

We are living in the information age, and one of the by-products of our tech-driven society is big data. Big data refers to the large sets of data that businesses either generate or have access to. By properly analyzing this data, businesses can gain better insight into their customers and the markets they operate in. This insight is valuable for creating effective digital marketing campaigns. Here are some of the digital marketing elements that can be improved by big data.

1. Improved Customer Targeting

A key component of any marketing strategy is market segmentation. No brand can have universal appeal in the market(s) it operates in. Market segmentation allows a business to identify the market segments that will respond most positively and target them with their marketing campaigns. Big data creates endless possibilities when it comes to understanding your customer base.

Past shopping behavior, demographic profiles, household profile, and even educational background can be used to determine customer needs and preferences with some accuracy. Big data can provide thousands of data points from numerous sources to be analyzed for customer insight. With this information, digital marketing efforts can be highly personalized to targeted market segments. Effective targeting achieves remarkable results when it comes to improving marketing outcomes.

2. Improved Forecasting

The effectiveness of all marketing efforts is determined, in part, by how the creators anticipate changes in the markets and the consumers they target. While forecasting is a difficult task, it is better facilitated when the marketing department is working from a position of knowledge based on reliable data analysis.

An in-depth review of past consumer behavior can provide insight into the seasonality aspect when it comes to the demand cycles of the products on offer. Data from competitor behavior and technological changes can enable a company to better anticipate product development trends. Marketing research can also unearth patterns showing changing consumer needs and preferences before they happen.

Other factors that precede changing needs and preferences in the market such as demographic changes can also be better predicted through big data analysis.

3. Improved Campaign Optimization Capacity

Even with the best personnel, it is impossible to determine how the target market will respond to a digital marketing campaign. There are so many unpredictable factors that come into play. With big data, a campaign’s market performance can be measured in real-time, and changes can be made to improve its effectiveness.

For example, if data reveals that your customers are responding better to Instagram ads rather than google search engine result page ads, then you can focus more of your marketing budget towards social media engagement.

Apart from showing which channels are effective, big data analysis can show which content on your marketing engages your target market. This ability to determine marketing campaign effectiveness in real-time is best leveraged by organizations that adopt a flexible approach to policymaking.

4. Working with the Correct Data

As we have already shown, there are many benefits that businesses can gain from big data. However, marketing departments need to ensure that they are working with the right data. Big data presents businesses with thousands of data points.

The best way to sort out the relevant data from the data with no value is to identify the marketing campaign’s KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). These are the metrics through which a campaign’s effectiveness will be measured.

For example, if a campaign aims to increase brand awareness, then Google mentions are a good KPI. The above-mentioned benefits can only be gained if the right data is used.

5. Proper Data Disposal

Businesses operating within the European Union have to comply with the GDPR laws which state that customer data must be disposed of once it is no longer being used. Most other global jurisdictions have similar data safety regulations in place.

To avoid the stiff penalties and reputational damage that comes from breaking these rules, marketing departments should have effective data disposal strategies in place. Disposal methods include degaussing (using strong magnets), hard drive destruction, and erasure.

Conclusion

Marketing departments can’t ignore the numerous benefits that big data offers to their digital marketing efforts. The insight gained from data analysis improves their customer targeting, forecasting, and campaign optimization. They also need to ensure that they can sift through the large datasets to determine relevant data and to properly dispose of the data after use, as per data safety regulations.