The changing business scenarios across the world are compelling the companies and industries, no matter how small or big they are, to step up their game in terms of big data and its use to transform the businesses. Important business decisions are now made in accordance with the big data.
According to Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google at Google’s 2010 atmosphere summit, there were 5 Exabyte of data created from the dawn of civilisation till 2003, but the astonishment exists in the fact that , this much of data is now created every 2 days.
Big data is an asset that could enable the companies to collect better market ideas and insights into the needs of the customers. As, for all that we know, it is the customer that flourishes or drowns the business.
Now, what exactly is this big data that we are talking about?
Big data is actually synonymous with its name, that is, it is a large collection of organised, semi-organised and unorganised data. The big data is an evolving term which comprises of several V’s which help to categorically depict its usage in marketing. These V’s are:
- Volume- the large chunk of data generated through websites, portals, online applications, online transactions, etc. constitute an insanely huge amount of data generated every minute. For instance, Facebook users alone send on an average, 31.25 million messages and view almost 3 million videos every minute.
- Variety- data can be present in diverse forms such as texts, graphics, tweets, videos and others which create the structured, semi-structured and unstructured data.
- Velocity- with about 4.39 billion people showing their presence on the internet, the amount of data generated in unit time is the velocity of the data. Being aware about the velocity of the data is important as, the faster the interaction with the data would be, the greater the business could benefit from those data.
- Veracity- with the huge volume of big data that is being generated, it is impossible for each and every data to be useful for a specific business. Therefore, the veracity of the data is its usefulness to a particular business. It is the degree to which the data is accurate, precise and reliable.
- Value- it has usually been perceived that people talk about the different V’s of the big data but do not have a proper understanding of what the big data is. Moreover, even if they understand about the big data, the most important task comes out to be the implication of that understanding in their business. The ‘v’ that we are talking about here, stands at the top of the pyramid of importance of all the other V’s. Until and unless there is a proper understanding of data valuation or finding the value of collected data, or the ability to transform all those flood of data into business, any kind of know-how of big data will render it useless. This can be illustrated by the fact that for a typical Fortune1000 company, an approximate of 10% increase in data accessibility could lead to an increase in the income by about $65 million.
The above mentioned description of big data can also be summarised in the way that the companies now try to understand the real-time demands of the customers by decoding the data from various sites online and implement them in formulating policies that will attract the customers. For instance, it must have been observed that when we search for a product on a particular website, we begin to get similar types of suggestions on other websites as well. This is one example of how data is mined from one website by another to target the audience and generate information on their interest.
Hence, the role of big data in digital marketing can be described as:
- Helps in the selection of right keywords: the selection and use of the right keywords in the blogs and contents is as important in marketing as advertisement. The big data therefore helps the companies to be aware of the popular keywords that would be doing rounds online at that moment.
- Create jobs: with the business now depending more on the analysis of big data, the need for data analyst is growing several folds. Back in 2012 itself, experts predicted that big data could add about 6 million jobs in just the united states.
- Enhancement of operational efficiency: proper analysis of big data could automate processes, optimize selling strategies thereby enhancing the overall efficiency of the business. For instance, sprint, a telecommunications company, uses Big Data Analytics for the reduction of network errors and improving customer experience. This helped the brand to achieve a 90% increase in its delivery rate.
Conclusively, we can see how important big data is for the companies and businesses. What is more interesting is that a mere 12% of big data is being analysed at present. It points towards the enormous potential that big data holds and the huge impacts that it could have in the future. It has such a huge relevance in today’s technologically dependent world because of the information that could be extracted from these data and utilised to strategically improve businesses.
Therefore, the most important areas where big data can make its presence felt are:
- Predictive analysis
- User experience
- Prevention of data theft or hacking
- Revelation of hidden insights
- Process automation
- New growth opportunities
- Data driven marketing
- Targeted advertisement
- Capture and curate browsing and purchasing data
For example, IBM and twitter entered into a strategic partnership for the purpose of selling analytical information to corporate clients.
Hence, the days of traditional business ideas and working are long gone. Big data is now the future that one needs to tap the potential of.
