Big data is an up-and-coming resource firms are using to gain more customer knowledge, and marketers are ready to turn up the heat on their investments in mining for the massive amounts of information. Recent statistics compiled at DMA 2012 and Forrester Research eBusiness Conferences revealed 68 percent of marketers are planning to increase data spending, while 45 percent believe analyzing data will be their biggest challenge.
Businesses bringing in employees to handle big data
According to recent research conducted by analytics firm Pentaho Corporation, nearly half of respondents are either in production with a big data project or planning to deploy one in the next 18 months. However, whether they have the staff to carry out those big data deployments is another story. Only 20 percent of respondents believe they are data scientists, making it hard for companies to deploy projects that require a lot of data.
While big data is the future of marketing for many firms, companies are ready to add new staff to carry out their deployments. The research (please contact us for sources) revealed 56 percent of businesses are planning to hire new employees for data positions, and 53 percent of responding companies said these new employees will be brought on to help the make greater use of the mass amounts of information. These professionals must be able to quickly make sense of data streams and put information in the hands of business decision-makers to improve the firm’s offerings.
“With the growing prevalence of data environments that include legacy relational databases and big data sources, organizations must be able to quickly and cost effectively reconcile existing database and data warehousing infrastructure with their big data stores,” said Richard Daley, founder and chief strategy officer at Pentaho.
Social media data can impact marketing strategies
A majority of today’s consumers have a presence on either Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus, and businesses need to take advantage of customer insights to help them improve their own brand. The study found 78 percent of respondents said they are planning to make greater use of social media data posted by consumers in the upcoming year, allowing them to change their campaigns to better market their products and/or services to their target clients. Social media streams are growing as both businesses and consumers are building a larger presence on such sites. The insights that are created by the online platforms must be taken into consideration by firms to improve their customer experience.
Big data capable of changing companies
Using massive streams of information gives marketers the opportunity to learn more about their clients and cater strategies to meet their needs. However study demonstrated 39 percent of businesses are not using information such as demographics and purchasing behavior to alter their marketing messages – a major mistake for firms that are building their own big data deployments.
Not only can big data help companies with marketing initiatives, the massive information streams can also improve the business in other ways. A recently created infographic produced by SAP showed 59 percent of C-suite executives said analytics could lead to more efficient operations at the firm, 54 percent believe such deployments could lead to higher sales numbers, and 50 percent see lower IT costs as a result of big data deployments.
