Today we are in the middle of a radical shift in the way we interact and communicate with one another. Factors like democratization of data, mobile computing, broadband Internet ubiquity, faster and cheaper computing prowess have all contributed in making big data so momentous today. Big data might happen to become as important as Internet itself to businesses and the society in general in the not so distant future. You don’t need to be intimidated by big data as that is clearly not going to help you in any way. All you have to do is implement these big data essentials to enjoy better ROI for all your digital marketing campaigns.

Use Data Analytics

You can find exactly how your website is faring using any data analytics that is available online. Google Analytics is a very useful tool if you want to get an accurate feedback on your website. All you have to do is register for Google Analytics and you can begin monitoring your website. It gives you an accurate idea about how many people visited your website and how long they stayed. You can find out how exactly they landed on your page i.e. the external site that directed them here. This is useful if you are already into digital marketing since now you know which are the campaigns that are working for you.

Go for Retargeting

Image Source

Today it is not enough if you track your users on your website, you need to keep tabs on them even after they leave your website. It is an essential part of retargeting wherein when they go to some relevant website you can again target them and have better chances of converting them to customers. Since the user has already seen your ad before, he is more likely to reciprocate positively to your ad this time around. But for this you need to use cookies in order to keep track of your user whenever he is online.

Exploit Social Media

The explosion of social networking sites is one of the hallmarks of the Internet since the rise of the search engines during the early part of the millennium. Today everybody is connected via Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, et al. This makes your job easier since all you have to do is find out what these people are saying about you and your competitors thus offering you a lot of insight into customer opinions and proclivities. You can then dovetail your digital marketing strategy accordingly and make the most of this new found knowledge.

Image Source

Learn from People’s Searches

Learning from people’s search queries can be a very rewarding experience for you if you do it analytically, diligently and persistently. This can throw light on what people are demanding and what are their expectations from any product or service. Google Trends is a very good platform to delve into people’s search patterns. You might not get too excited in the beginning since it is a whole lot of data that you have to sift in order to get anything valuable out of it.  But if you do it with perseverance then you would be surprised to find out how much insights you can gain about your customers both existing and prospective. You can get a detailed list of what people are searching, the frequency with which they are doing it, the websites that they click on the results page and such other useful nuggets of information.

Put your House in Order

Before you go about looking for data anywhere on the World Wide Web do organize the data that is lying in your own data centers. This can be immensely helpful in ways you would have never imagined possible. You can do detailed research about your customers and profile them as per their past interactions with your website and the result that it delivered to you. You can compare two instances where you received different results and find out the exact reasons for such a disparity; sales is one parameter to consider here.

DBMS (Database Management Systems) from marquee names like Oracle, IBM and Microsoft cost prohibitively high and are beyond the reach of small business enterprises. In such a scenario, you can consider buying the software from small suppliers who differentiate themselves by focusing on niche markets. You can even try Linux operating system as a database platform since it is an open source product. According to Forrester Research’s product evaluation, open source databases viz. Ingres, PostgreSQL and MySQL come out as some of the best.

You can find out the exact reasons why you could not convert your leads to sales in a particular scenario as you are now backed by compelling data from your own database. This shall help you fine-tune your digital marketing strategy saving you precious resources by offering you better insights into conducting highly targeted campaigns.

Position² Point of View

Today we are living in a world where information is generated at an unprecedented rate and off-the-shelf raw computational power is getting better by each passing day. Now these are the two parameters that make big data so widely popular and sensational. You might love it or you might hate it but you just cannot ignore big data. The field of big data analytics is still in its infancy. The explosion of data in today’s world is really mind-boggling to say the least. Data scientists today are the new age rock stars (excuse the metaphor). There is highly valuable information out there in all that raw data that is zipping from one end of the globe to the other in the blink of an eye. Though it is still nebulous as to where we are headed in terms of exploiting big data to our advantage, one thing is for sure that big data analytics has evolved today from being a business initiative to a business imperative. The faster you realize that, the better it is for the fortunes of your company.