The implementation of big data has proven to increase a company’s ROI by as much as ten to 20 percent depending on the metrics used. Productivity can also increase by five percent and lead to six percent higher profits than other competitors. Enterprises not using big data in their operations are missing out on the benefits that come from increased data gathering and analytics.
Why marketing teams have not become data-driven
Marketing teams of different industries seek a greater ROI when producing and launching various campaigns for lead generation and sales. Some marketing practitioners avoid big data for reasons like the belief that managing big data tools, like Hadoop Hive, is really difficult. Other reasons are acheiving lower gains than expected and that greater impact can be achieved by doing other things not involving big data. For some marketing departments, it may come down to not knowing what big data applications to use or not and having trained staff to handle the processing of massive amounts of information.
CMOs are in a pressure cooker to deliver above-market growth and successfully manage increasing amounts of data. 72 percent of CEOs report that marketers are constantly asking for more funding but can hardly explain how much incremental business this funding will generate. With this mounting pressure and difficult explanations, marketing professionals have another obstacle to overcome in employing the use of Big Data.
Quick facts for Big Data marketing success
Global spending is up to roughly $1 trillion each year leading successful marketers who employ analytics to find they can improve returns ten to 20 percent translating to roughly $100-200 billion more in sales each year.
Understanding the breakdown of the data deluge will help marketers gain a better connection with the changes in information management. 42 percent of European consumers carry out web searches on their mobile devices in stores. 61 percent of consumers globally use digital channels as part of their purchasing decisions and 78 percent of mobile activity is data.
U.S. companies with more than 1,000 employees store at least 150 terabytes of data. Big data leaders in industries from financial services to IT to retail bring in significantly more revenue than companies who don’t use big data at all. If marketers used data enough and had the right technology, 50 percent of companies surveyed would not report struggling to measure the impact of digital marketing on sales and profits. 80 percent of companies don’t measure the ROI of their social media and 63 percent of projects don’t use marketing analytics to inform decisions. Marketing's use of big data has proven to drive an average of 14 percent profit improvements with 82 percent of companies achieving above 5 percent profit improvement.
Getting started with Big Data marketing for greater ROI
Change has proven to be difficult and changing an organization’s approach to big data is no different. When marketing data can be directly tied to sales, service and ROI, CMOs can more readily prove the value of big data and what it means to an enterprise. Marketing departments tend to be late adopters of technology automation, but it really just takes an active CMO to get the ball rolling.
Starting with measuring what you can will be a great start for CMOs and their staff. Marketing executives can easily have a tendency to be focused on measuring tactical exchanges between a consumer and a marketing campaign. Marketers are too focused on the easy bits of information to collect like social media “likes”, open rates, downloads and reviews.
Although collecting and understanding these pieces of data are important for future campaigns, they don’t always translate to the return part of ROI. CMOs need to find a way to collect the aforementioned data points and build analytical models to show how these points add to business-related metrics like market share, revenue, customer acquisition, lifetime value and even net present value. When this is achieved, organizations will be able to join the club of big data practitioners who achieve greater ROI on a regular basis.