How Business Analytics is Changing the Way Companies Market to Consumers
Last Updated May 28, 2019
Big data helps marketers gain a better understanding of their customers. The more marketers know about their customers, the more they will be able to optimize spending and improve the user experience. Using business analytics in marketing helps companies target customer needs by focusing their messaging or timing of a certain product or service on what is best for the consumer.
Understand Your Customers Better with Big Data
Marketing is about reaching the right customer at the right time, and the marketers that really know their customers are often the ones achieving the most success. Understanding how big data works allows marketers to predict purchases, analyze customer behavior and better understand the people buying their product or service.
Big data allows marketers to gain access to insights about who is interested or engaging with their product or content in real time. With this information, marketers can personalize their messaging based on a specific customer’s digital behavior. Companies using marketing automation software can tie digital behavior data back to their customer relationship management (CRM) strategies. This allows them to track the specific topics that their customers are most interested in, and then use that data to send people tailored content based on their particular interests.
When marketers connect data to the human experience, it allows them to create buyer personas to help create better, more informed digital strategies, along with highly-targeted marketing campaigns. A persona is a composite representation of an actual customer, created for the purpose of understanding customers’ wants, needs, goals and pain points. Content marketers often use buyer personas to create and deliver content to the appropriate audiences depending on factors such as age demographics, average income, and purchase motivators.
Big Data Equals Big Payoff
Big data also allows marketers to gauge how much money they are spending and how it can improve. This allows businesses to allocate their marketing dollars more efficiently.
Between 2006 and 2014, global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company surveyed more than 400 diverse client engagements across a variety of industries and regions. The company found that an integrated analytics approach can free up fifteen to twenty percent of a company’s marketing spending, and estimated as much as $200 billion worldwide could be reinvested to other areas.
A surveyed property-and-casualty insurance company in the United States responded that they used big data to increase their marketing productivity by more than 15% each year from 2009 to 2012. The company reported they were able to make better business decisions and keep their market spend at an efficient level, even as related spending within the industry grew by 62%.
Successful marketers understand that a positive customer experience typically leads to more sales and referrals. In today’s data-driven world, customers are now more aware that brands can collect their information through loyalty cards, social media activity, and company apps, to name a few. They understand that when a brand recognizes who their customers are, and what motivates them, they do a better job meeting customer needs.
A marketer who wishes to be effective in today’s competitive market must be able to look at the data, understand it, analyze it and then interpret it to create a smart marketing strategy.
