The Complete Guide to Big Data and Marketing for Your Startup

Marketing your company used to be about creating branded merchandise and collecting information about your customers. It used to be about manipulating your market so that people would naturally arrive at your door, ready to do business. It wouldn’t take more than just developing a brand and keeping with it.

Now, times have changed. Markets are bigger, and so marketing strategies need to keep pace. Marketing is no longer just about getting people to your website, it’s about understanding your role in a market and improving it. Big markets need big data marketing — understanding your role takes a huge amount of data.

Beyond demographic and financial information, you also need to collect information about your users’ behaviors. To fully understand the market you’re in and adequately serve it, you need to understand the people who make it up. And that takes data — a lot of it.

Keep reading below to learn how big data is changing marketing, and how you can get started with it.

Big Data Marketing Is Huge

Almost every industry is changing because of new big data technologies, and marketing is no different. Big data changed the way people approach problems like lead generation or systems of engagement. And these new ways of approaching marketing problems are getting better results.

Big data technologies collect massive amounts of data at once — more than any team of people would be capable of getting. Once it collects this data, intelligence systems analyze data trends and identify patterns which would pass by average analysts. Marketers can then use these patterns to make better decisions and attract more people to their business.

In any modern market, information is power; big data is about nothing but information. That’s why more than half of all companies have already adopted it.

Learn Your Audience In Greater Detail

Knowing your target audience is a fundamental marketing concept that anyone can understand. You need to understand what kind of person would be most interested in your company before you can market to them. Yet, big data has taken this concept to the next level.

With big data analytics, companies can segment their audiences to understand which sub-groups are benefiting the most. They can look at geographic location, demographic, financial state, and other basic information for large swaths of their audience. By segmenting your audience like this, you can tailor different campaigns to different people.

That way, you can maximize your overall campaign’s effectiveness and resonate deeper, and with more people.

From Demographic To Psychographic Data

Big data analytics has married with social media to create one of the most powerful marketing technologies to date: psychographic data. With psychographic data, you’re stepping beyond basic demographic information and into people’s head. You can identify what specific individuals are interested in, and tailor your marketing for them.

Through a person’s social media, you can tell if someone is interested in politics or not. You can tell if they value time with a close-knit group of friends or in large groups. You can identify what concerns them, and what they hope for in the future.

Psychographic information doesn’t only apply to individuals, either. You can expand psychographic data for specific demographics, to identify when concerns certain segments of your audience. Then, you can tailor your marketing to meet their needs and attract them to your company.

Predict Your Users’ Behaviors

Predictive technology is nothing new. Ever since Google introduced predictive searches with its search engine, it’s become a fundamental part of many businesses. It’s helped create the entire SEO industry. And it’s all powered by big data.

Since big data is about identifying patterns that would otherwise go unnoticed, it would only make sense for it to also predict behavior. With big data analytics, you can predict how people will use your website. That way, you can improve it to ensure people have the best experience possible working with you.

Tailor Recommendations For Individuals

When you shop with a company online, you’ll probably notice it will start recommending items you might like when you return. That’s because big data has enabled companies to identify patterns in shopping behavior. When one person makes a specific purchase, they’re likelier to purchase something else, based on raw statistics.

Companies can take advantage of this to bring interesting items to the forefront of a person’s search results. And when the items a person is interested in are easier to find, they’re more likely to buy them.

Measure The Health Of Your Campaign, And Your Company

Most importantly, big data marketing allows marketers to measure the success of a campaign with more accuracy than ever before. By using the sheer volume of data available to them, they can measure the difference a campaign makes. All they need to do is compare the data from before a campaign started to the data from after.

And even better, they can identify a campaign’s viability in three different forms.

The first form can measure your marketing campaign’s success in resonating with its target audience. Behavioral data allows you to gauge whether your online reputation was improved or harmed by a campaign. All you would mostly need to look at is social media data, as well as customer feedback.

Operational data can help you improve later campaigns by gauging your success at managing resources and managing assets. Big data analytics tracks patterns in internal data as well as external, helping your company improve itself.

Finally, big data analytics can identify patterns in the thing most important to your company: it’s finances. You can measure the ROI on your marketing in greater detail, and see whether a campaign was viable or not. With this information, you can identify where you can potentially save money, and where you should spend it more.

Big Markets Need Big Data

Markets are bigger now, far bigger than they’ve ever been in the past. The internet has enabled globalization to change the way people do business and connect across the world. Markets are no longer identified by their regions, but by the people who fill them.

Big data marketing helps you keep track of all these new markets, and of the people that use them. As the internet changes and companies compete to keep up, big data will give you the edge you need. And as an entrepreneur, you should know you need every edge you can get to succeed in a market.

I can help you with that. Contact me, and I will discuss your company with you so you can get a fresh perspective on it. I’ll help you develop a new edge against your competition, so you can stay ahead and be successful.