The importance of data can’t be overstated in its part in revealing patterns, trends, and insights. Data is an integral part of developing a digital marketing strategy.
Digital marketers must develop winning strategies and campaigns using different tools to engage with their target audience. Data analytics is one of the most effective tools modern marketers utilise to do this.
Making sense of consumer data helps digital marketers optimise campaigns, increase ROI, and boost conversion rates. This may sound like a difficult task, but big data provides detailed insights that may otherwise be unattainable to strengthen digital marketing efforts.
Here’s how big data is changing the future of digital marketing.
Provides real-time customer insights through Sentiment analysis
Marketers have realised that understanding their target audience is important to stay ahead in today’s competitive business landscape. Given this realisation, big data analytics is the best way for marketers to understand and know their target audience.
By conducting a sentiment analysis—an opinion mining technique—businesses can gain information about how they’re perceived by their target audience.
For instance, businesses can obtain information about what customers want from a brand, what they think about them, and what purchases they made using a specific channel.
Marketers can use this information to determine their brand’s strengths and weaknesses, develop better products and identify new business opportunities.
Analysing social media posts, reviews, and other forms of customer behaviour is important to assess someone’s view of the brand.
But, in the future, sentiment analysis will take on a more in-depth role where systems will be able to measure emotions in written content and in voice and facial expressions to determine the relevant conversion strategies.
Drives key digital marketing decisions
With data being the currency of the future, it’s no surprise that data will continue to provide key insights into consumer expectations and buying patterns.
With an increasing amount of devices becoming connected—from vehicles to home appliances— brands have the opportunity to develop smarter and more customer-focused communications.
Marketers are using this data in a variety of combinations, including personal, location, and environmental data to target their customers, using the right touchpoints at the right time with the right device.
From supermarket chains automatically sending out targeted messages to customers when they pass by their stores with the latest offers or discounts based on their purchase history to delivery apps sending personalised messages based on previous searches or purchases, big data is providing businesses with more and more insights that can be used in a variety of ways to get the best results.
Improves efficiency of digital marketing campaigns through predictive analytics
Campaign effectiveness is an important part of digital marketing. The success of a digital marketing campaign depends on which customers have been contacted, when they have been contacted, how they have been contacted, and what they were offered.
This is where predictive analytics will help devise the right campaigns that have the most impact. Predictive analytics looks to the past and present to develop future campaigns and strategies. Using this, marketers can decide which customers should be targeted and with what content.
Response rates can also be increased as these campaigns are deployed at the right time using the right channels.
The presentation of the campaign will also have an impact on its success. From maps and graphs to images and charts, people respond to different materials in different ways.
Studies show that people respond to more visual content to understand data sets, as we are all visual by nature. Big data offers the advantage of targeting potential consumers at the right time to make the most impact.
Creates intelligent consumer personas
Businesses can leverage behavioural data and other data acquired by third parties to identify which part of the lifecycle their consumers are currently in and learn more about the consumers’ requirements.
Businesses can collect this information by directly asking their customers, tracking their behaviour, and including the existing information they have about the customers. This enables businesses to get a better understanding of their customers and build more targeted customer personas.
Once this information is collected and analysed using AI, machine learning, natural language processing, or data mining tools, businesses can obtain information about where, when, and how customers would like their experience with a brand to be personalised.
Building these personas will enable businesses to provide the right information at the right time using the right methods to give the customer a truly unique and relevant experience that they may not be able to get outside of the brand.
Big data has significant applications in the future of digital marketing
“Data is king” and the benefits that big data offers businesses are unmatched.
Knowing the target audience and how to engage their attention at the right time is a formula that can only be achieved by obtaining the right information.