If you have kept tabs on any form of business news over the last few years, you will have probably come across the term “big data”. It’s the buzzword that has journalists drooling, and senior management for that matter, and it’s for very good reason.
Once upon a time marketing activity might have been actioned through instincts, or a vague idea of what worked well in the past. Now, it’s all fed through data, and this has all been made possible through technology.
Let’s now take a look at some of the ways big change has transformed marketing departments within corporations, and made their activity substantially more worthwhile.
True data can be bought
Remember the days of buying mailing lists, or lists of “potential customers”? For any business that did follow such a path, we would have to question just how many of these customers actually turned into true leads.
Now, things are changing. Armed with the data that they are legally able to obtain (and through various digital legislation changes, this has been made more difficult for some companies), they can sell to truly targeted customers. These sales prospecting tools are as targeted as can be; they can find customers who genuinely have a chance of converting for you—not the ones that were just found on a mass mailing list.
The targeting factor
Thanks to the likes of Google and Facebook, the amount of versatility in relation to targeting that businesses have is quite surreal. Once, it might have been a case of targeting a television advert at a time when you “thought” that your target audience was tuned in. Now, you can target people based on their age, occupation and a whole host of other factors. This means that companies are able to spend their money more wisely than they have ever been able to in the past.
The power of retargeting
Following the last point about targeting, let’s now talk about retargeting. This is a little more recent, but allows companies to target consumers who might have visited their webpage in the past. This already provides a suggestion to them that they might be interested, so companies tend to spend more to show an advert to said consumers.
Nowadays, such a method doesn’t have to cost a small fortune either, with all of the big ad networks opening up such a possibility to the small business owner.
Personalisation
Let’s leave one of the most interesting points until the end. Personalization is still quite young, but it will allow companies some incredible targeting opportunities. Through the use of big data, it will allow companies to personalize their website based on the type of person who is viewing it. Suffice to say, the infrastructure behind such a system is immense and it means that companies can, for example, show younger users a different range of products than to their older ones. However, this is still in its infancy as companies get to grips with the technology that is required.
