The expansive growth of the internet is evident as the telecoms industry is spending billions in infrastructure to boost internet penetration even further. In developed countries where broadband internet is already available, quality is being focused through introducing new innovations such as upgraded conventional cable and fiber optic technologies. For device makers, the number of internet enabled devices have expanded with bigger scales, particularly the smart phones and tablets. Internet is now becoming the new protocol in communication, workplace, and gamer centers among others.
The internet’s role in commerce
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There are two reasons why internet has become an important tool for consumer companies. First, is the ability of companies to interact with customers. Internet has created a platform for companies to build brand relationships, market their products, engage their consumers, and ultimately make a sale. The second reason, is the increasing importance for companies to use customer data as customer intelligence. Customers are known to be spend hours on the internet which has created large amounts of information. The large amounts of data reveal a lot about customers’ interests, purchases they make, content of their communications among others. When customers’ information is collected, recorded and analyzed, it opens the door for the use of “Big Data” and advanced data analytics.
Cracking the “Big Data” code
While companies in various industries have collected large amounts of data and online information, very few companies have been able to crack the data for marketing insights. To be precise, the massive data amounts companies have collected from consumers is more of a liability than an intelligence asset. This is because companies are unable to exploit the value of the data. For instance, to budget for advertising especially the digital advertising, a company must be able to know which customers are interested in the products offered.
Two techniques are used, one is retargeting – which means follow-ups on customers with targeted banners, e-mails and other advertising modes, to users who previously visited the websites or Facebook page among other sites and not purchased. The second technique is to select websites to advertise based on the interest of the audience. For any of the two techniques to effectively deliver its objectives, the company has to customize their ads based on the user profiles and interests. “Big Data” is simply offering business unlimited possibilities to be effective and efficient in their marketing goals.
Making sense of “Big Data”
According to McKinsey, there is an approach to access the power of “Big Data” by profiling the web users on their web histories while also customizing digital advertising as needed.
There are four key steps:
Step 1: Profile users — through cookies and other forms of anonymous tracking, marketing teams collect large amount of web history about web users. Through semantic and algorithms analysis, a company can profile these users based on their behaviors. For instance, a user may be profiled high on “sport” profile because he/she searches keywords that are related to sport.
Step 2: Link to products — if the user’s purchasing behavior is being analyzed based on a specific product, companies identify the correlation between the profile characteristics of the user to the product. Marketers achieve this using the percentage of the people who actually bought the product and not those who merely clicked on the advert.
Step 3: Tailor advertising — in this step, marketers can build the digital campaign which is focused on the customers segments, selected as the most likely interested in the products from the previous step. The aim of segmentation is to serve the users within the segment with segment-specific ads.
Integrate algorithm – the final step is for the company to integrate algorithm with the digital advertising management tools such as digital marketing dashboard. Digital marketing dashboard is meant to track the metrics of the online marketing activities on behalf of the marketers. The metrics are then analyzed for decision making. The practices are then made part of day-to-day processes as the business grows to target more customers.
Benefit of enhanced digital marketing to marketers
The refined approach of digital marketing has demonstrated clearly what every marketer needs to know about data analytics. Results of the data reveals clearly that there is a correlation between the web user profile attributes and the sales conversion rates. The best way for a marketers to be more competitive, is to capitalize on the strong correlation and serve digital advertising to customer segments with the highest conversion rates.
The analysis has focused on the way online users are profiled based on internet data to revolutionize digital marketing but this is just one use of “Big Data”. The application of “Big Data” is limitless and that is one of the reason why marketers simply do not know how to use it. In some way, this technique has been found applicable to the offline world. Marketing organization should therefore, take as much stock of online data readily available to turn future advertising into a strategy that would make the company the competitive in the industry.
