THE ROLE OF BIG DATA ANALYTICS IN DIGITAL MARKETING

Big Data

Given the massive importance and growth of both big data analytics and internet, every company is today looking for big data and analytics solutions to reap benefits. The potential that big data analytics hold in the world of digital marketing has yet to be known by many. Adoption of big data analytics is still in its infancy, according to Gartner Survey data. Marketers can leverage this technology by transforming the data sets into structured formats initially. Machine learning is another emerging field in the big data and analytics which uses a software to find patterns within massive amount of data sets by surpassing human capabilities.

Digital marketing will soon transform into big data driven-market. The number of internet-capable devices is also increasing as smartphones are becoming popular and the demand for tablet is exploding every day. Digital marketing is one such field where online data drives success for the marketers. While marketers used to collect plenty of data including names, mailing address, contact numbers, among others, this data doesn’t constitute big data analytics, email marketing came into existence.

A Data-as-a-Service offers real-time insights in order to help companies and marketers to deliver the products to customers on the basis of likes and dislikes of users. The data produced from big data can be classified into 6 categories-

  • Search Information- By identifying online users through the process of onboarding (matching customers with their online IDs), browser activity is taken into consideration to predict the behavior and preferences of the user.
  • Web Mining- This process comprises an automated process of extracting and discovering data from servers and web documents, including unstructured datasets. Every dataset is compiled after it undergoes the open web mining process.
  • Crowdsourcing- This includes gathering and compiling collective intelligence from the public. Data is collected from myriad sources including polls, forums, and surveys, among others.
  • Social Media- The internet user on an average spends around 2 hours every day on the social media websites. Insights can be derived from a vast spectrum of data based on likes, shares, check-ins, comments and personal preferences among others.
  • Mobile- The applications and background tasks other than user patterns and smartphone penetration can help marketers in hitting the right strategy.
  • Transactional- Data is created whenever a company conducts business, logistical or a financial process revolving around activities such as insurance claims, withdrawals, deposits, credit card purchases and flight reservation, among others.

Big data and analytics have certainly become a big deal for every industry today. But for most of the marketers, understanding advanced analytics tools and techniques is still a mystery. As industries realize the power of data to create successful advertising and marketing campaigns, big data and analytics are slowly becoming an integral part of the digital marketing ecosystem. Armed with data and valuable insights on purchases and customer behavior, marketers will now integrate big data models into their business strategies in order to make even more informed decisions. Data is on the way to becoming a ‘big basic necessity’ in the world of digital marketing.