“He who wants the pearls has to dive into the sea” ~ Kurdish Proverb
Information is exploding, growing exponentially with every passing day. It’s a complete onslaught of media, newer TV channels, and more radio stations, ever increasing social media sites, more and more apps demanding our attention. Add onto that, the expansion of your brand stores, more sales and customer level data to absorb!
Consider the media scenario today – one remarkable phenomenon which is fairly apparent is the shift of preferences from so-called traditional media (TV, radio et al) to the new age online media. And mistake not, this movement is much faster than what is visible to the naked eye. While for most organizations, the digital media budgets still remain lower than the traditional media, the shift in priorities is pretty much on the face.
Let’s get real, online is the medium with a truly mass reach. If that’s not good enough, it allows businesses to interact with its customers – one-on-one, literally. So here we have it now “Mass Media with a Personal Touch”. Has this not been the dreams of all the marketers for so many years?
Well then, if it is all so evident, what is it that’s required to ride this giant? The first and the possibly the most critical thing is to know what’s happening and to get the right information, at the right time and with valid inferences. As someone aptly said, “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”.
So what are the challenges? When an organization starts treading this path of data analytics, factors like Inaccessible technology, lack of focus, non availability of skilled personnel act as impediment in its journey. Even when the data is all available to the organisation, as in case of internal sales data, consumer offers, store level data, conventional media data, market shares etc., often times a majority of companies have little understanding on how to meaningfully assimilate those data sets to support action oriented decision making. The vision of benefits of analytics and the value of data just do not get established.
Here is the silver lining though, the importance of pooling in data from all possible sources and making the most relevant business conclusions from that, is gaining the due traction. The benefits of ‘Big Data Analytics’ have just about started to dawn on the business managers, and rightly so. Innovative players in the field of Big Data Analytics, like Mixpanel are developing this as a complete science. Mixpanel allows data inputs from virtually all possible sources (sales data, distributors data, store level data, audience monitoring reports etc.) and brings out action oriented data analysis.
Talking specifically about the online medium, it would be fair to say that WEB is like an open book, everything can be tracked with a proper science backing it. Further, leaders like Google now have robust measurement and decision enhancing tools, such as Universal Analytics and Skyglue, available to the business managers who want to be sure how their efforts are effecting consumer connection. Today it is pretty much possible to track the entire consumer decision journey, on the web, and feed communication almost customized to each of the customer or customer set. Thus, remarketing based on the customer interactions on the net is becoming a very effective tool to ensure customers are caught at the right moment to effect their decision in your brand’s favour.
To sum up, organisations ready to start this journey may need to consider the following steps:
- Develop and believe in the culture of data based decision making
- Put together a skilled team of internal and external partners who can support the cause of organization
- Dig deep into the rich data to draw the real benefits of all the data that exists in the reach
- Get close to the customers, understand her purchase decision cycle better
- Build the right communication and consumer connect strategy; serve befitting communication to sharply segmented customer groups (or even individual customers).
- Review and realign
Join us at the Smart Data Summit at Dubai on 25th and 26th May, at Sofitel Dubai the Palm Resort and Spa, to delve further into this ever expanding ocean of Big Data. arroWebs is the official Start-up Innovation Partners at the Smart Data Summit.