Download How to Use Big Data to Achieve Marketing Goals

How to Use Big Data to
Achieve Marketing Goals
Combine your data, your people
and your vision to make the right
decisions for your business.
Entrepreneur and marketing maverick Richard Branson
once said1, “By turning challenges into opportunities, you
will find success you never realized you were capable of
achieving.” Branson may have been talking about business
challenges, but he could just as easily have been referring
to big data.
Generally defined as massive and complex data sets
that encompass information on everything from product
purchases to online consumer behavior, big data
can overwhelm—especially if you work in a field like
marketing. While it holds an immense amount of value,
Grow your business,
one number at a time.
Data is “inherently dumb”, says2 Peter Sondergaard, senior
vice president and global head of research at Gartner
Research, which routinely reports on big data trends.
According to Sondergaard, big data doesn’t do much of
anything—unless you know how to use it.
One way to use it is to grow your company and revenue.
Every business has access to performance data like revenue
reports, gross and net profits, and sales numbers. Most
already rely on this information to anticipate sales and
forecast revenue. But divvy it up and distribute this data to
your executives—your CEO, CFO, COO, CMO, and VPs—and
it becomes the launch pad for a highly effective sales and
marketing strategy.
Consider the story of Harry & David3. The hundred-year-old
direct mail company was hit hard during the economic
downturn in the mid 2000s, filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy
in 2011. But the retailer bounced back beautifully and
even expanded4. How? According to Paul Lazorisak, the
company’s former VP of Customer Marketing, the solution
lay in sales data analysis and customer segmentation.
Harry & David knew, for example, that a large segment of its
customer base only buys around the holidays. “They love us
at Christmas, but only at Christmas,” Lazorisak said5. “Try
to have a conversation with them about Mother’s Day or
Easter and you not only waste resources, you risk driving
them away.” By leveraging information the company had on
these and other customer groups, including demographic
and transactional data, Harry & David was able to identify its
most valuable customers, tailor messages to each segment
to boost sales numbers, and even predict revenue.
“The biggest change for the company is that it’s datadriven,” Lazorisak said. When you can extract sales trends
and buyer behavior from larger data sets, your executives
are better equipped to make decisions that will positively
impact future sales.
it’s cumbersome to manage. And when your hope is to
meet then surpass your business goals, where do you even
begin?
Marketers may struggle to harness the deluge of business
intelligence that swamps their desks daily, but it can be
done. Start with those business goals. Identify the data
needed to achieve them and call on your staff to leverage
its strengths. It may feel like a challenge, but take it from
Branson: you can turn big data’s complexities into an
opportunity for success.
Big data’s
profit potential
2.5
QUINTRILLION
Estimated bytes of data 6 created each day.
54%
TOP PRIORITY
54% of digital marketers7 named big data
in marketing as a top priority in 2015.
56%
56%+ marketing professionals8 saw revenue
increase from data-driven marketing in Q1 2015.
80%
NOTED POSITIVE CHANGE
80% of senior data and IT decision makers9
noted a positive change in revenue from using
big data.
2
Mine data to improve your
products.
The potential of big data—or rather, manageable bites of
it—to help you develop better products is huge. After all, the
more you know about how customers use your goods and
services, the more prepared you’ll be to meet their needs.
That goes for everything from retirement planning solutions
to Venti® dark roasts. Recently, global coffeehouse chain
Starbucks10 revealed it used11 both order trends sourced from
its baristas and industry data on at-home tea and coffee
preferences to guide the development of its newest product
line. The knowledge that 43% of its tea-drinking customers
say no to sugar—along with many other findings—led the
brand to create two new types of unsweetened ice tea
K-Cups®.
This kind of insight is readily available to all businesses.
Start, as Starbucks did, with your own customer data.
Pinpoint the parts that relate to product usage: preferences,
time of day and frequency of purchase or use, and where
your customers are likely to buy and consume your goods.
Comparing individual product sales figures and customer
reviews can expose sales patterns and help you decide
what products should stay and what should go. Next, curate
existing market and industry research. Competitive analysis
can prove useful for zeroing in on your target—and you
might just find that your focus isn’t currently on the product
that needs the most support.
When your aim is to enhance your product line or service
offerings and develop a more effective go-to-market
strategy, call on your CMO, VPs, directors, sales leaders,
and account managers to take the reins. They should be
able to boil all that customer data down into a rich product
development and sales resource.
Use big data
for product
development
Sales figures
User information
Contact center data
Customer service
channels
Customer reviews
Sites/blogs for
competitor analysis
Industry journals
Market research
Social listening
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The operations connection:
big data is the science that
improves your process.
Imagine this scenario: You’ve used big data to expand your
customer base and improve your products. Business is
booming. Then all at once you find yourself asking whether
you’re prepared to meet increased demand.
Business process management and workforce planning
are right up there with big data as major challenges facing
businesses today. But coping with them is often just a matter
of knowing what’s coming around the bend. When your goal
is to avoid a talent shortage, analyze sales and production
data to gauge whether you’re effectively balancing supply
and demand. When you want to improve operations, assess
data on production cycles, time to delivery, and staff
performance.
Pair your operations managers and directors with your
data analysts to increase productivity and whittle down
overhead—and make sure your team is ready to respond
to change. Big data’s impact on your operations can’t be
overstated. You’re likely to find untold opportunities to turn
that business intelligence into a better business, whether
that entails hiring more staff or streamlining your production
process.
As of last year, 43% of
marketers controlled
their customer data .
14
Build the brand
you always imagined.
To understand the importance of big data to branding,
look no further than your marketing team. Whether you
employ a branding agency or produce your promotional
efforts in-house, the brand managers, content marketers,
SEO and PPC experts, and graphic designers tasked with
increasing awareness of your brand build their campaigns
on a foundation of first- and third-party data. Studies show12
that US marketers spent about $11.5 billion on data and datarelated solutions last year, up half a billion dollars from 2014.
That’s because boosting awareness requires a deep
understanding of your customers and how they interact with
your brand. Before you can shake someone’s hand, you need
to know they’re in the room with you. Data such as site visits,
ad views, clicks, survey responses, and focus group results
tells you how, where and when to engage your customers so
you can devise an effective brand strategy, determine the
optimal adverting mix, and succeed on social media.
With just 27% of C-level executives13 currently confident that
their organizations make “highly effective” use of data, the
time is right to tap into your marketing department’s existing
big data expertise and supplement your team with additional
knowledge as needed.
4
Make your customers smile.
In our modern world, where consumers have countless
brand and product choices at their disposal and can make
or abandon a purchase in the blink of an eye, a positive
customer experience is paramount. When it’s sliced and
diced, big data can be used to determine whether your
customer experience meets consumers’ high standards or
is in need of improvement.
Here, you’ll want to look at data like web usage, time
spent interacting with the various sections of your site,
the path your visitors took to get there, the feedback
they leave, customer surveys, and call center complaints.
How many clicks does it take for site viewers to reach
their desired product page? How long before the typical
customer support ticket is resolved? This information holds
the key to a more relevant and personalized customer
experience—and in many cases allows companies to
identify problems and make necessary upgrades before
too much damage is done.
Your digital designers, digital producers, user experience
team, SEO experts, and social media managers are best
suited for applying your customer experience data in a
way that benefits both your company and your target
audience. This data will also tell you whether you’ve got
the technology needed to improve customer experience—
and the right staff to use it. The task of managing customer
interactions may fall to many different members of your
team, but big data mobilizes them and allows them to take
what they need to succeed.
92% of
marketers
believe that
integrating data
across teams
can lead to
improvements
in customer
service.
15
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Build a better brand reputation with
the help of customer comments.
How much do you currently know about how your brand
is perceived by your customers? When your goal is to
build a good reputation for your company, the answer
is found in online survey results, Twitter polls, replies to
your Facebook posts, comments on your YouTube videos,
and purchase intent. Mining social media for customer
comments provides a window into brand sentiment, while
online reviews and sales data can point to aspects of your
business in need of improvement.
This is the kind of data that’s best analyzed by your public
relations managers and customer service team—though
there are marketing applications as well. For example,
have your SEO team run the numbers on search phrases
that pair your company and product names with key
words like “I love” and “I hate.” You can use the results to
create a more holistic picture of your customers’ past and
current impressions of your company, and then adjust your
advertising messages accordingly. The information you
This may seem extreme, but Buffer is a social-sharing
service—so why not put the emphasis on sharing?
The company really wanted to create a culture of
transparency17 while building and maintaining a loyal
customer base. Being candid about your business isn’t
always easy, especially when things aren’t going so well,
but Buffer stands by its approach18 stating, “Transparency
can not only survive during times of hardship—it can help
you thrive.” Buffer now has a reputation for being real and
honest, which studies show19 consumers rank as the most
important behavior in a brand.
6
glean from your customer data might lead you to revisit
your customer relationship strategy or email outreach
program, both of which might benefit from tweaked
messaging that puts the emphasis on trust, your brand’s
philosophy and values, and your dedicated employees. You
simply won’t know until you put all that data into buckets
and sort through it, one set at a time.
Typically, reputation data is used internally to refine
your brand behind the scenes. But what would happen if
you took it public? Social media management software
company Buffer did just that and has been reaping the
benefits ever since.
Since the company’s early days, Buffer has shared data
online related to how its customers use its products. In
2014, it went a step further and published its employees’
salaries. Buffer now even posts its monthly revenue16.
Before you apply your data for reputation management
purposes, work with your PR and marketing teams to
develop a strategy for using it right. Coupled with the
invaluable human insight and experience of your staff,
big data can make great brands greater.
Big data = big competition
64%
of senior decision makers say big
data is “changing traditional business
boundaries and enabling non-traditional
providers to move into their industry.”
Source: Big & Fast Data: The Rise of
Insight-Driven Business, Capgemini
53%
65%
expect “startups
enabled by data” to
become an increasing
source of competition.
of senior decision-makers
believe they could
become irrelevant and/or
uncompetitive if they fail to
take advantage of big data.
Data can put you ahead of the game.
Regardless of how and where you put big data to work,
one thing is certain: arming yourself with an effective
strategy and skilled workers who can manage its
complexities can put your business ahead of the curve.
Knowing the intricacies of your customers, their behavior,
how they use your products, how well they know your
brand, and how they perceive it provides total insight into
your current success and potential for growth. Having
access to business intelligence from external sources
like industry and market news reports, technological
advancements, and consumer behavior means your
business analysts and market researchers can identify your
place within the market and determine how to get—and
stay—ahead of the game.
When you break it down, big data is really
just information in search of its purpose.
It can be effectively managed, used to
form goals and leveraged to make prudent
In the retail world, top brands are investing in big data
strategy, business expertise in the form of an experienced
team, and a data-driven culture. Enterprise big data
analytics Teradata reports20 that big data allows leading
retailers to anticipate seasonal trends, assess local buying
preferences, optimize shopper experiences, and boost
engagement through tailored offers. In finance, meanwhile,
big data can be used to target services and manage
risk for “increased operational efficiency and business
performance21.” Whatever your industry, look to big data
to give you that coveted edge or retain your position as an
established leader in your field.
marketing decisions that help you reach said
goals—if you have a vision for your business
and the people in place to realize it.
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Conduct an internal analysis of your staff, and let us help
you fill in the gaps. Paladin provides recruiting expertise
across marketing, communications, creative, and digital
platforms. We can find the talent you need, anytime and
anywhere. Get in touch.
SOURCES
1.
Richard Branson, “Turn Challenges Into Opportunities,” Virgin.com, February 24, 2016.
2.
Press release, “Gartner Says It’s Not Just About Big Data; It’s What You Do With It: Welcome to the
Algorithmic Economy,” October 5, 2015.
3.
Harry & David, harryanddavid.com, 2016.
4.
“Analytics bears fruit,” sas.com.
5.
“Analytics bears fruit,” sas.com.
6.
IBM Big Data & Analytics Hub, “The Four V’s of Big Data.”
7.
Emarketer.com PDF, “Big Data Roundup,” May 2015.
8.
Emarketer.com PDF, “Big Data Roundup,” May 2015.
9.
Emarketer.com, “Marketers Are Noticing Benefits from Big Data,” October 1, 2015.
10. Starbucks.com, 2016.
11. Sarah Whitten, CNBC.com, “Starbucks knows how you like your coffee,” April 6, 2016.
12. Al Urbanski, dmnews.com, “Big Money for Big Data: Marketers Will Spend $11.5 Billion in 2015,”
February 27, 2015.
13. Anne Fisher, Fortune.com, “Why Big Data Isn’t Paying Off for Companies (Yet),” February 5, 2016.
14. News Release from teradata.com, “Teradata Global Survey: 90 Percent of Marketers Say Individualized
Marketing is the Future,” January 28, 2015.
15. News Release from teradata.com, “Teradata Global Survey: 90 Percent of Marketers Say Individualized
Marketing is the Future,” January 28, 2015.
16. Metrics overview, buffer.baremetrics.com, March 6, 2016-April 5, 2016.
17. Carolyn Kopprasch, “5 Years of Openness (So Far!) – Buffer’s Transparency Timeline,” December 10,
2015.
18. Courtney Seiter, “The Best Time For Transparency Is When It’s The Hardest,” October 28, 2015.
19. Geoff Beattie, “2014 Authentic Brands Study: The Age of Authenticity,” October 29, 2014.
20. Bigdata.teradata.com, “Keys To Cross-Channel, Retail, & Big Data Success.”
21. Jessie Zhang, atkearney.com, “Big Data: The Next Leading Edge in the Financial Industry,” September 2014.
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