Igniting Customer Connections: Fire Up Your Company's Growth By Multiplying Customer Experience & Engagement

Chapter 17Big DataWhat Do Marketers Need to Know about Big Data?

A few years ago, Big Data existed only in the realm of high-level mathematicians and rarefied areas of business and science. Now Big Data is a key area of marketing technology, one that merits additional discussion and exploration. While entire books have been written on the power and potential of Big Data, here we provide just an overview of five key things that marketers need to know about it.

Big Data Will Help You Create More Relevant Customer Connections

With the rapid evolution of digital technologies, new digital channels, as well as Big Data, marketers can no longer rely on traditional methods of the past to better understand and segment their customers, especially as these customers reach across a broad range of new and somewhat fragmented digital channels.

We all know that these digital consumers move fast when it comes to researching, connecting, and projecting opinion about any brand. They also tend to engage in real-time conversations about their brand experience. As these consumers gain social influence, their opinions (negative or positive) will reach a growing audience that will likely propagate these opinions across more and more channels. All of these interactions and connections result in an increasing amount of Big Data of varying types—including unstructured data, such as a post to a social network.

As consumers embrace an ever-expanding number of digital channels, marketers are now able to ...