How Big Data and predictive marketing can create harmony between your sales and marketing teams and increase your ROI.
The concept of big data may be something you’re still trying to get your head around, but it’s actually nothing new.
For years, marketers have been familiar with practices of data mining and database marketing. Whether you worked with MS Access or a simple Excel; remember selecting customers for a mail blast based on pre-determined filters?
How great was that? You could target your customers by country, industry; gender, profit turnover the sky was the limit. Well, more like the ceiling actually. Anyone who’s ever worked in what used to be called direct marketing will remember the glory days.
Preparing a direct mail campaign for a list of completely unknown entities and being excited by a two percent response rate. Time’s moved on.
Big data is basically a term used to refer to the amount of information generated and stored every second on a global level. And that’s not so much “big” as cosmically vast. But having terabytes of information available is pretty much useless without a viable way to navigate it. According to IBM Big Data & Analytics Hub, big data depends on four Vs:
No really. It doesn’t. Size doesn’t always matter when it comes to big data because it’s not just about how big it is, but more about what you do with it. If you’re constantly receiving insights into customer behavior, purchasing history and social preferences; but you’re not using them, then any data, big or small is essentially useless. All this information needs to be digitally analyzed by marketers so that they can reveal consumer patterns and predict trends and behavior.
Using big data correctly allows you to gain real insights that lead to better decision making and more effective marketing spend. Which allows for laser-targeted marketing (there’s a term you’re more familiar with), increased conversion and higher sales.
Just as science can predict the weather based on mapped patterns, predictive marketing analyzes past historical customer data so that it can predict future activity. But trying to analyze that kind of data manually is clearly out of the question. The only way to harness the power of big data and make big sales is by using the right predictive marketing software. So if you’re still using an Excel for storing your company information, it’s about Time you got more sophisticated. Welcome to 2016.
Predictive marketing trailblazer Mintigo, increases your company’s marketing effectiveness at every stage of the sales funnel, capturing data in real time and organizing various data types.
