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Thought Leadership

Big Data: Transforming Marketing from Good to Great

”A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.” – Wayne Gretzky, Hockey Great.

The difference between good and great companies lies in their ability to respond to emerging business trends, opportunities and/or threats faster than the competition. It also lies in the ability of a business to be able to anticipate its customer’s future needs instead of just trying to serve them based on historic information. The ability to predict the future is increasingly becoming a part of a new business reality.

How Big Data is Shifting the Marketing Paradigm

There is a huge paradigm shift that is happening in marketing, especially with the emergence of Big Data. Big Data allows marketers to not only take into account what people say, but also what people actually do when they are interacting with brands and products. This is a fundamental paradigm shift from traditional marketing. As a result, a retailer or a bank, or a media company can look into – not just the social media conversations and information available in traditional enterprise applications, which tells them what people are saying  — but also look into actual purchase histories, loyalty program information and web clickstreams to find out what people are actually doing. Focus group data may indicate what customers are saying but it may not tell you what they are actually doing, and how they are engaging in real time. It is important to know – what products or brands they actually purchase, which products they recommend to their network, are they a possible Net Promoter, their propensity to engage with a given brand. Big Data helps to gain an understanding to these very questions. By leveraging the wealth of information in Big Data, consumer centric companies can optimize, not only their products, but also their pricing as well as delivery channels. Big Data allows companies to understand customer behavior and their propensity to engage or buy certain types of brands and products. It allows companies to engage consumers to a level  that was never possible before, and to start building strong brand loyalty.

Additionally, consumer behavior is more dependent on their most recent actions — hours and days — than on historic consumer data that may be contextually irrelevant. The consumer’s location, time and which products, brands and people they are engaging with socially, most recently, play a significantly greater role in their propensity scores and how they are likely to behave than outdated, batch-mode data.

Big Data: A Marketer’s Weapon to Transform from Good to Great:

With Big Data, marketing organizations can transform from being good to great and change the competitive landscape in their industries. They can transform their market segmentation by gaining a real-time 360 degree view of the consumer. Achieving micro segmentation to the level that they can start targeting individual customers. Not only can they understand what the consumers are saying, but also, they can predict what consumers will actually do based on their behavior and context. They can not only just market to their customers, but also engage them with their brand. They can not only sell individual products in isolation, but also capitalized untapped cross-sell opportunities. The CEO of a Fortune 100 bank recently stated his sentiment about customer engagement and the huge, untapped cross-selling opportunity:

“Because the way we think about the business is helping customers succeed financially and satisfying all their needs. How can you do that if you only want to pick out one piece? We think that when customers have a deep, long-term relationship with us, we get to know them, they get to know us, and we can see their entire financial situation. It’s so much easier to sell somebody the sixth product when they already have five with you and you can give them a better deal. Today we have over six products per retail household on average. And we’re still scratching the surface.” – CEO of Fortune 100 Bank in CNNFN.com interview.

In a nutshell, the use of Big Data allows marketers to target individual customers and offer them personalized product offers, coupons, content or advertisements. Big Data can help marketers in dramatically increasing conversion rates, customer engagement, coupon redemption rates and optimizing marketing spend. Big Data allows a marketer to better predict a consumer’s behavior and  her propensity to engage. Big Data also allows the marketer to get closer to the customer to build strong brand loyalty and cross-sell revenue stream. Have you been able to get this close to your consumers? Are you using your Big Data to go from good to great?