“Big Data” is a big deal nowadays. With it come big dreams and big intent. Its implication for business, medicine, politics, and more is enormous. But what is its potential impact on Marketing? How might it change our work?
I see 2 core marketing applications for Big Data: 1) crafting a more personal appeal and experience for prospects and customers, and 2) better predictive analysis to decide where next to invest your marketing dollars.
Marketing, when done properly, has always been a data-driven discipline. Direct response marketing (e.g. direct mail, telemarketing, infomercials) was the granddaddy of performance analytics. For the longest time, it was the only way to collect and analyze hard data about who replied to what message via which medium and to what offer. And the offer was based on whatever data we had about the target audience.
For decades, we’ve tried to parse the sales prospect universe into ever-increasing micro-segments with very specific descriptive information about the receiving audience. Now imagine what having access to an extended data set of increasingly detailed information for each person in your targeted market slice could mean to your response rate.
You could craft sales messages and product offers with an amazingly specific set of appeals to each individual on your target list. Same goes for your clients and encouraging repeat sales or just nurturing their loyalty and willingness to tell others about you.
Not only would your results improve but, depending on how finite you created your test panels, you could collect an immense amount of detail on what worked, to whom, when, and much more. That’d mean the ability to better predict what the results of future efforts will be. You’d be in better shape for knowing where to invest your marketing budget.
Beware though. Big Data is not, in and of itself, a solution. It’s not going to improve results if you don’t know how to design for its use, nor how to interpret and apply the results it returns.
In other words, like all tools, it’s only as good as the craftsman wielding it.
Please also bear in mind privacy concerns. In marketing, we drive results based on our understanding of our target audience and our ability to explain we have a solution that solves a problem they recognize.
If Big Data for marketing means people must reveal increasingly more personal and specific elements of their lives, we may see pushback from buyers. They may say that getting more personalized offers or better discounts is finally not enough incentive to provide the details of their lives. Who knows?
For now, have fun with Big Data. Use it. Explore it. Experiment with it. As it becomes more available to you, use it for all its worth. But don’t expect it to be a cure-all. Remember your marketing fundamentals and you’ll use data – of all sizes – to your best advantage.
What do you think? Is Big Data going to fundamentally change how we market? If so, how? For which industries? All of them? Please comment below and let us know what you think?