Status and future of Big Data in Marketing

What is Big Data? Is there any difference between data and Big Data? If yes, what are the differences? And, why are the differences? Different from traditional marketing, big data is a term used to describe the collection, processing and availability of huge volumes of streaming data in real-time. The three V’s are volume, velocity and variety. Companies are combining marketing, sales, customer data, transactional data, social conversations and even external data like stock prices, weather and news to identify correlation and causation statistically valid models to help them make more accurate decisions. In the past, the database technology could not support to process huge amount of variety of data. Conversely, Big data solution could provide more accurate analyses that enable businesses to make better decisions. 

Why big data matter in marketing? The era of Big data changes today’s world. The large increase in the amount of data, such as digital photos, videos, and social media, generates significant business opportunities for sales and marketing professionals of small and midsize companies. According to Mick Hollison, there are four ways Big Data that has been changing sales and marketing since 2015. First, large enterprise would be the first to widely adopt big data and predictive analytics technologies, but more and more small and medium businesses will get on board soon thereafter and will benefit even more. Second, Marketing spend are becoming significantly more precise by leveraging insights from big data to accurately target prospects and deploy account-based marketing strategies. In addition, sales forecasting accuracy has been improving dramatically as sophisticated algorithms supplant "gut feel" as the weapon of choice for predicting sales. Moreover, real-time sales data visualization technologies have been emerging and empowering sales managers to adjust battlefield tactics based on live data feeds. 

How does big data really impact and improve in real life marketing? Here are some examples. With big data, companies can easily see exactly who is buying and tease out even more details about their customers, including things like which websites they frequent, which social media channels they use, and even which buttons they click while on a website. Also, Data can provide insights into who your customers are, where they are, what they want, how often they make a purchase, when and how they prefer to be contacted, and many other important factors. Companies also can analyze how users interact with their website – or even their physical store – to improve the user experience. Furthermore, the ROI of a blog post used to be extremely difficult to measure, but now, thanks to big data analytics, marketers can easily analyze which pieces of content are most effective at moving leads through a marketing and sales funnel. Even very small businesses can afford tools to implement content scoring, which can highlight the pieces of content that are most responsible for closing sales.


Big data is like a little Giant in marketing and almost in all other industries nowadays. It is unavoidable in today’s world. But no one knows how it will develop because it is a newly emerged term and the technology is evolving all the times that has unlimited potential. However, we can look at some predictions from the foremost experts in the field to get some ideas how likely the future of big data would be: 

1.     Data volumes will continue to grow.  considering that the number of handheld devices and Internet-connected devices is expected to grow exponentially.
2.     Ways to analyse data will improve. While SQL is still the standard, Spark is emerging as a complementary tool for analysis and will continue to grow, according to Ovum.
3.     Big data will face huge challenges around privacy, especially with the new privacy regulation by the European Union. Companies will be forced to address the ‘elephant in the room’ around their privacy controls and procedures. Gartner predicts that by 2018, 50% of business ethics violations will be related to data.
4.     More companies will appoint a chief data officer. Forrester believes the CDO will see a rise in prominence — in the short term. But certain types of businesses and even generational differences will see less need for them in the future.
5.   “Autonomous agents and things” will continue to be a huge trend, according to Gartner, including robots, autonomous vehicles, virtual personal assistants, and smart advisers.
6.   Big data staffing shortages will expand from analysts and scientists to include architects and experts in data management according to IDC.
7.   Algorithm markets will also emerge. Forrester surmises that businesses will quickly learn that they can purchase algorithms rather than program them and add their own data. Existing services like Algorithmia, Data Xu, and Kaggle can be expected to grow and multiply.
8.   “All companies are data businesses now,” according to Forrester. More companies will attempt to drive value and revenue from their data.
9.   Businesses using data will see $430 billion in productivity benefits over their competition not using data by 2020, according to International Institute for Analytics.
10. “Fast data” and “actionable data” will replace big data, according to some experts. The argument is that big isn’t necessarily better when it comes to data, and that businesses don’t use a fraction of the data they have access too. Instead, the idea suggests companies should focus on asking the right questions and making use of the data they have — big or otherwise.  

References:
https://martech.zone/benefits-of-big-data/
https://www.projectguru.in/publications/difference-traditional-data-big-data/
https://www.inc.com/mick-hollison/5-ways-big-data-will-change-sales-and-marketing-in-2015.html
http://data-informed.com/how-big-data-analytics-can-improve-your-marketing/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2016/03/15/17-predictions-about-the-future-of-big-data-everyone-should-read/#135eea6e1a32