Don’t let big data make your head spin: Building a user-friendly marketing ecosystem
Welcome to today’s marketing data ecosystem. It’s a myriad of data sources and tools that are supposed to help you to make more informed ‘data driven’ decisions; taking the guess work out of everything from media buying to sales and revenue attribution. That said, in reality, it can seem like a daunting array of ever-proliferating information, technologies, and vendors that makes you wonder: will it really make my job easier? The buzzwords alone – like Hadoop, big data and machine learning – are enough to make your head spin.
Ideally, your marketing data ecosystem allows you to store, ingest, govern, process, analyze and visualise data. It supports all aspects of data and data technology. So, selecting the right partners, vendors and tools for storing, processing and effectively analysing these very large datasets is critical to the success of your marketing data strategy.
To complicate things further, the options vary from generic tools requiring companies to supply all the knowhow, to highly expensive enterprise-wide solutions that promise to solve all marketing and advertising technology needs. In between, there are boutique products and service-oriented solutions that focus on specific technology needs or provide unique integrated service offerings.
From an economic perspective, the best way to answer this question might be to look at the values of companies that are driven by data and to note that data adds value. Companies like Uber, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook have market valuations far beyond those of other traditional companies with far greater revenue.
First you need to know which data sets to use and where they’re going to come from. With so much internal and external data available – from structured data from your ERP and CRM systems to unstructured mega data sets from social outlets etc. – the trick to using this ‘big data’ is to discover and extract the ‘golden nuggets.’ This data mining of valuable customer insights is where science intersects with planning.
What’s relevant to your marketing department is the value of this data once it’s distilled and analysed. Only then can it deliver a more thorough and insightful understanding of your business and customers. Armed with this information, CMOs can crafted a stronger, more competitive product positioning, which will have a significant impact on the bottom line.
Moving data from its source and making it available to decision makers in a timely, simplified manner is a task that hasn’t fundamentally changed since mainframe days. Yet, while the goal remains the same, the obstacles and complexity to successfully create and maintain a data-driven source of analytical truth has become exponentially more difficult.
One of the biggest hurdles is the sheer number of new data sources that generate unprecedented amounts of output, often with very little structure. From social media sources to machine and sensor readings, the onslaught of data from multiple channels can be overwhelming.
