What’s the main purpose of a marketing campaign for any business? You’re trying to convince the customers you offer exactly what they need. What do you do to get there? You find out what they need. This is where big data gets into the picture.
Big data is a general term for all information that allows you to understand the purchasing decisions of your target consumers That’s not all. Big data also helps you create a sustainable budget, find the best way to manage your business, beat the competition, and create higher revenue. In essence, big data is all information that helps you grow your brand. The process of analyzing and successfully using that data is called big data analytics.
Now that we got the definition out of the way, let’s get practical. We’ll help you realize how you can use big data to understand the behavior of your customers and grow your brand.
Where Can You Find Big Data?
This is the big question about big data: where do you find it?
- When you’re looking for data that you could immediately turn into useful information, you should start with the historical data of your business. This includes all information for your business you collected since it was formed. The earnings, revenues, stock price action… everything you have. That data is already available to you. You can use it to understand how your business worked under different circumstances.
- The US Census Bureau holds an enormous amount of data regarding US citizens. You can use the information about the population economy, and products to understand the behavior of your target consumers.
- gov is another great website to explore. It gives you data related to consumers, ecosystems, education, finance, energy, public safety, health, agriculture, manufacturing, and few other categories. Explore the field relevant to your business and you’ll find data you can use. This information is for US citizens. If you need a similar tool for the EU, you can explore the European Union Open Data Portal.
- Facebook’s Graph API gives you a huge amount of information about the users of the platform.
How to Use Big Data to Your Brand’s Advantage
Collecting big data is not that hard. Information is everywhere. However, the huge volume of information you collect might confuse you. For now, you might want to focus on the historical data for your business. That should be enough for you to understand the behavior of your customers. When you understand how the analytics work, you can start comparing your historical data with the information you get from governmental and social media sources.
These are the main questions to ask when analyzing big data:
- The average amount your customers spend on a typical purchase. This information helps you understand their budget and spending habits. Did they spend more money on an average purchase when they used promotions?
- What’s the situation with conversion? How many of the social media followers follow a link and become actual customers? These rates help you determine the effect of your marketing campaign. When you understand it, you’ll be able to improve it.
- How many new customers did you attract through promotions? Did those activities help you increase the awareness for your brand?
- How much have you spent on marketing and sales to attract a single customer? Divide the total amount of expenses for promotional activities with the number of customers you attracted while the campaign lasted. You’ll get the acquisition cost of a single customer. If it’s too large, you’ll need to restructure your promotional activities. Compare historical data to identify the campaigns that were most and least successful in this aspect.
- What do your customers require in order to stay loyal to your brand? Do they ask for more support or communication?
- How satisfied are your customers with the products or services you offer? What’s the difference between the categories of happy and unhappy customers? When you determine the factors that make your customers happy, you’ll be able to expand on them. When you identify the things that lead to dissatisfaction, you’ll work on them.
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Every Business Benefits from Big Data
You feel like you have to own a huge business to get interested about big data? That’s a misconception. It doesn’t matter how big your company is. You still have tons of data to analyze, and you can definitely benefit from it & bigdata solve problems easily
Collect all data described above and compare it with the way your customers behaved in the past. Are you growing? If yes, why? If not, why?
The key to understanding the behavior of your customers is to give this information a human face. Connect the numbers with the habits and spending behavior of your real customers. When you relate the data to actual human experience, you’ll be able to develop customers personas. You’ll increase the level of satisfaction your consumers get. When you do that, the growth of your business will be inevitable.
