Marketing has never been an easy task. It requires you to understand your target audience’s needs and preferences, correctly predict their changing demands, and hit the right note with your messaging, every single time.
It’s a task that’s arguably grown more challenging thanks to the digital transformation, which opened up a whole new arena in which marketers can compete and ratcheted up the speed with which trends emerge and disappear.
However, the shift to digital also brought a raft of new marketing tools and communication channels, and best of all, much more data. Big data is the linchpin for today’s marketing successes, enabling marketers to understand their market on a deeper level and develop more effective messaging and content.
As big data keeps growing, well, bigger, it’s influencing marketing tactics and strategies too. Here are some of the ways that big data is reshaping marketing in 2022 and beyond.
Deeper marketing insights
With the help of big data plus advanced marketing analytics platforms, marketers can achieve unprecedented visibility into their customers’ likes and dislikes, and the impact of their marketing work.
Cloud data warehouse tools unite data from all your sources, including internal sources like website analytics, external sources such as social media channels, and organization data that might previously have gone unnoticed, like finance data or sales data. Integrating data in this way makes your marketing reports more comprehensive, and thus also more valuable.
An advanced marketing data management system supports faster response times to your queries, so you can experiment with different queries and run more complex data visualizations that give you deeper insights into the trends and influences affecting your audience’s choices.
Increased personalization
Today’s customers aren’t impressed by mass-produced, generic marketing content. They’re looking for customized messaging that’s tailored to their personal interests and shopping habits, and that goes for both consumers and business buyers. More than 90% of buyers say they aren’t likely to respond to non-personalized communications.
Fortunately, big data delivers the real time insights into customer preferences that support this level of personalization. Personalized product recommendations on sites like Amazon are now seen as the norm; popups and special offers are customized; and more brands are adopting dynamic personalized content on their websites.
A rise in account-based marketing
Account-based marketing (ABM), which sees marketing and sales departments collaborate to identify, nurture, and convert specific leads, is surging in popularity, and it’s all made possible by big data.
ABM relies on using data to determine which of the many prospects before you are the best fit for your solution, and guiding you to serve them with content that’s relevant to their organization size and structure, pain points, and position along your funnel. An integrated, cloud-based data system also ensures that sales and marketing communicate smoothly, so that everyone has the updated information they need about the prospect’s progress and responses.
Faster response times
Patience is in short supply these days. Your customers want a swift response when they contact your company and a rapid resolution to any problems that they encounter, but it’s a struggle to deliver that kind of one on one, instant customer support.
Big data and artificial intelligence (AI) come to the rescue by powering conversational chatbots. By crunching data from customer interactions with human support agents, businesses can program chatbots to handle progressively more, and more complex, issues, freeing human representatives for problems that AI can’t handle and speeding up response times all round.
Less guesswork
It used to be tough to measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, and designing high-performing marketing assets involved more guesswork than science. But not any more.
Today’s marketers can run ads, gather data about the audience’s reaction, and use AI-powered marketing analytics to discover which messaging, placement, image choices, and more are the most effective in reaching their marketing goals.
Big data supports an iterative process that lets you field more relevant and effective ads, and see better RoI on marketing.
Proactive social media management
Big data has given rise to the new tactic of social listening, where you’ll survey social media channels, review sites, and customer support tickets to discover what people are saying about you and the latest chatter around your vertical.
With social listening, brands can track awareness and reputation, compare their brand image to that of their competition, and detect hot new trends while they’re still emerging. This way, you can act quickly to run ads based on the latest trending topic, or nip negative press in the bud before it snowballs.
After big data, marketing will never be the same again
There’s no escaping the impact that big data is having on marketing. The jump in data that businesses can access means that marketers can up their understanding of their audience, deliver fast, personalized, and high-performing content, sculpt their brand reputation, stay ahead of trends, and nurture the right leads to see conversions, sales, and ultimately profits rise.
