Download Transforming Big Data into Insight: Getting Past the Hyperbole

White Paper
Transforming Big Data into Insight:
Getting Past the Hyperbole
White Paper
Transforming Big Data into Insight:
Getting Past the Hyperbole
Introduction: Big Data, Roadmap
to a Big Revenue Opportunity
It doesn’t matter what industry you are in, or what marketing technologies you
use, Big Data represents a big revenue opportunity. Data are exploding at a rate
of nearly a 1000 percent increase in the last five years from offline and online
sources that are just waiting to be monetized (“Extracting Value from Chaos,”
IDC, June, 2011). Compounding this challenge are social media and mobile
communications which create new ways to buy B2C and B2B products. Every
customer touch point generates marketing data.
However, in reality, for most marketing organizations, the Big Data issue is
a missed revenue opportunity. For all of the tremendous productivity and
effectiveness that marketing automation and campaign management systems
provide, they are very limited in handling Big Data, and transforming it into useful
insight. As a result, marketers are missing out on crucial data that are driving
buying decisions from their target markets.
The nature of Big Data is really three fold – time, volume, and
source. Time and volume are really driven by the real-time nature
of the Internet. While this data are in many cases adequately being
captured on a company’s Web site, mobile and social media
conversations about a marketer’s brand are being sorely missed.
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Why Take Action?
The nature of Big Data is really three fold – time, volume, and source. Time
and volume are really driven by the real-time nature of the Internet. While this
data are in many cases adequately being captured on a company’s Web site,
mobile and social media conversations about a marketer’s brand are being
sorely missed. Additionally, it is these sources, mobile and social media that
are generating huge volumes of marketing-related data in real-time that are
creating missed revenue opportunities. In fact, while reading this white paper,
there are a multitude of lost buying opportunities your team is missing right
now. In essence, it’s a revenue leakage problem. To illustrate the point further,
IDC further states that of the 35ZB (zetabytes) of data that will exist worldwide
in 2018, over 32ZB of that data will come from the world of mobile, social
media, and email – unstructured data.
The challenge for
the marketer then
is to use Big Data
in a timely way, in
real-time, to create a complete
customer profile
that drives crosschannel marketing and revenue
performance.
The challenge for the marketer then is to use Big Data in a timely way, in
real-time, to create a complete customer profile that drives cross-channel
marketing and revenue performance. Traditionally, some of the online
customer interaction history could be brought together by marketing
automation and campaign management platforms that matched customers
based on email id. This is an inadequate way to create a true customer
profile for cross-channel marketing purposes and underscores the need for
marketing databases.
Today, marketing automation platforms, in an attempt to meet some of the
requirements of burgeoning Big Data do provide the capability to match
customers on social and mobile id, but this is also inadequate. True and
comprehensive customer profiles for cross-channel marketing need to include
all forms of customer data – online and offline, to get a 360 degree view of
the customer. Once that occurs, it is then possible for marketers to use a
marketing database, extending beyond what is in a marketing automation
and campaign management platform, as an interactive marketing hub, where
customers are matched on email, social, and mobile ids, along with their
purchase and service history. Unstructured data from social media and SMS
text messaging can then be integrated into those marketing hubs to drive true
buying experiences that meet the demands of Big Data – time, source, and
volume.
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Big Data + Insight = Revenue Attainment
Transforming Big Data into insight is what drives revenue attainment by using
an interactive marketing hub. The issue isn’t whether insight is necessary; it’s
what kind of insight do marketers need to effectively segment their markets?
Defining the issue that way enables marketers to treat insight as an evolution,
rather than a revolution by:
•
T
reating existing data as insight
•
L
earning from it, e.g. what size customer or title groups are your best
prospects
•
Improving upon it over time and fill in the gaps – even if it is basic
firmographic information, e.g. revenue size, industry, titles
Marketers need to unlock the power of insight in the form of their data. For
example:
Those basic
questions begin
to paint a picture
around insight
that tells the
marketer how
Big Data is flowing in their marketing channels.
•
W
hat is the most popular message or offer to a particular type of contact?
•
H
ow many contacts, and their title and type of company, actually
responded to the message or offer?
•
W
hich channel was the most effective?
Those basic questions begin to paint a picture around insight that tells the
marketer how Big Data is flowing in their marketing channels. In this simple
example, a marketer would form the beginning stages of segmenting, profiling,
and interacting with customers in ways they want to be communicated with.
After all, Big Data doesn’t come into your marketing environment from one
source; they literally flow from hundreds of sources, both offline and online
and includes purchase, customer service and pre-sales history. As a result,
marketers are missing out on leveraging Big Data strategically through their
existing marketing automation and campaign management platforms.
Transforming Big Data into Insight: Getting Past the Hyperbole
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Marketing Roadmap for
Big Data Success
Here are several steps, based on our experience in handling tens of millions
of customer interactions, all over the globe, on effectively harnessing Big Data
effectively to meet and exceed your revenue goals:
To tap into all forms of customer engagement, online and
offline, across any marketing channel, a purpose-built
marketing data mart, integrated with your marketing and
campaign platform, is required...
1. Use all forms of customer engagement
By customers, we mean prospects and your buying customers. Customer
engagements, or interactions, are critical to the marketer from a segmentation
and a buying behavior perspective. But accessing, using, and acting on that
data can be daunting in today’s marketing automation systems.
To tap into all forms of customer engagement, online and offline, across any
marketing channel, a purpose-built marketing data mart, integrated with your
marketing and campaign platform, is required to bring together all of your
customer interaction and purchasing history to make it actionable.
•
C
reate matching rules that uniquely identify a customer across all
channels and tie marketing and sales activity together
•
M
atch on multiple data elements other than email address for a complete
profile
•
M
atch online and offline data sources
•
C
onstantly update contacts with the most trusted information sources
based on your business rules
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Using a marketing database with
customer intelligence tools specific to your customer interaction
history turns your
marketing automation platform into a
driver of revenue
performance.
The end result? A complete customer interaction profile based on products
purchased, channels of engagement, and service history.
2. Make deriving insight strategic
Most marketers want more customer intelligence, but they’re not sure how to
get started with the avalanche of customer data that exists today. Marketing
automation and campaign management provides various ways to measure
campaign performance through reports and dashboards. But what about
customer intelligence that really looks into buying behavior?
For example, what if you could perform a customer journey analysis,
identifying the behaviors of prospects at the buying stage with the kind of
online and offline channels that most correlate to those buyers receiving the
type of information they need to move onto the next stage?
Customer intelligence capabilities provide a holistic view of prospects and
customers, including:
•
P
rofiling results by campaign and customer attributes
•
Identifying opportunities based on the level of risk and reward
•
U
sing new forms of interactive reporting and data discovery, based on
campaign performance and interaction history
Using a marketing database with customer intelligence tools specific to your
customer interaction history turns your marketing automation platform into a
driver of revenue performance.
3. Transform Big Data
Everyone works to clean their data, but it’s not just about de-duplication or
merge and purge. There’s a lot more that needs to be done to transform data
to make it truly usable and actionable.
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Aggregating
data from multiple online and
offline sources
progressively
adds attributes
to your customer profiles.
Making data usable and actionable goes beyond your marketing automation
and campaign management platform. There are a number of technologies and
processes, you’ll want to implement, including:
•
U
sing data libraries to clean and validate data
•
D
ecoding raw incoming data to Improve its usability
•
Using
derived attributes based on complex relationships within the data
that enable you to more rapidly discover buying behavior to use directly in
campaigns driven by your platform
•
C
reating a quarantine around incomplete data until it is ready for use
4. Data management as part
of your strategy
The goal here is to create actionable customer interaction profiles that you
can use in your segmentation. Here’s where a number of actions can produce
big results in the marketing database you’ve now created:
•
P
rogressive profiling is a great capability within a marketing automation
system. But you want to add that capability in a much more sophisticated
way to your customer data through interaction history. Aggregating data
from multiple online and offline sources progressively adds attributes to
your customer profiles.
•
S
tore and manage a client’s entire prospect universe in the marketing
database, but load only relevant customer data into the campaign
management system or marketing automation platform to create greater
campaign efficiency and lower costs
•
U
se portfolio management for data acquisition to test and measure the
effectiveness of all list acquisition activities
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Take a comprehensive turnkey
approach to maintaining complex
firmographic and
demographic segmentation and
profiling, involving
appending, storing, and updating
attribute data
33 Arch Street, 9th Floor
Boston, MA 02110
T: 617.880.4000
F: 617.880.4001
www.quickpivot.com
•
T
ake a comprehensive turnkey approach to maintaining complex
firmographic and demographic segmentation and profiling, involving
appending, storing, and updating attribute data, while working directly
with a data provider
•
C
reate business rules to distribute campaign responses to the SFA
system based on type of campaign, geography, product, partnership, or
business unit
With data management as part of your strategy, and transforming data into
insight as a result, you’ll then be in a strong position, with the right technology
and campaign strategy, to begin moving toward real-time cross channel
marketing.
About QuickPivot™
QuickPivot is the leader in real-time cross-channel marketing automation and services for B2B and
B2C enterprises. QuickPivot delivers insight plus channels plus content in one marketing platform to
enable marketers to listen, connect, learn, and adapt to the changing needs of customers. For more
information, visit www.quickpivot.com, or call +1-617-880-4000, or email [email protected].
All content Copyright ©2014, QuickPivot, Inc. All trademarks are property of their respective holders.
Transforming Big Data into Insight: Getting Past the Hyperbole
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