Each day, consumers are voluntarily posting vital information about their likes and dislikes on social media sites. If this data can be captured and adequately organized, businesses can have at their disposal the exact information they need toimprove their marketing efforts.

Financier and CEO magnate Douglas Merrill once said, “With too little data, you won’t be able to make any conclusions that you trust.  With loads of data you will find relationships that aren’t real… Big data isn’t about bits, it’s about talent.” According to a recent infographic released by IT consulting company iconicmind.com, Merrill is onto something — research shows that big data lends a big hand in the marketing world!

The recent LinkedIn article titled, “Big Data: What Does it Really Mean?” discusses the heavy influence of big data mediums: “From investing and retail spending, to Web browsing, social media, and mobile phones, it’s estimated that 90 percent of all data in use today have been accumulated within just the last two years!”

So just what exactly constitutes “big data?” Simply put, big data refers to information’s ever-increasing volume, velocity, variety, variability and complexity. The advent of progressive, human activity has led to a staggering acceleration of generated data, however the collection of these data sets have become difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications.

The challenge therefore comes with storing and analyzing huge data sets to support a superior level of decision-making that drives accuracy, time management, customer segmentation and real-time marketing — and its demand cannot be denied. It is estimated that over the next three years, there will be a 60 percent increase on marketing analytics.

The current value in 2013 for the big data industry is $18.1 billion, with projections expected to nearly triple in 2017 to an estimated $47 billion! We can thank consumer consumption for such  high demands of big data analytics. It’s estimated that three billion people worldwide create eight zettabytes of data; yes — zettabytes. That’s 10²¹, or one sextillion. That’s a lot ‘0’ data!

As a result, marketers are coming to terms with how to use big data and analytics to better target consumers. In doing so, they often face multiple challenges at increasing rates, such as resolving the capture, curation, storage, search, sharing, transfer, analysis and visualization of large amounts of data.

Recently, new capabilities are taking data analytics to the next level; enabling marketers to utilize big data sets in rapid and cost-efficient ways by implementing the following processes: distributed processing, cloud storage, and data management strategies.

The following statistics from a 2013 survey released by computer software corporationTeradata highlights the benefits of implementing big data marketing strategies:

• 58% of survey respondents believe making more accurate decisions is a benefit of basing those decisions on data
• 50% of marketers say that marketing and IT are not strategic partners in their company
• 40% of marketers gave their department a grade of C or lower for using data to drive marketing
• 71% of marketers plan to implement a Big Data analytics solution in the next two years
• Less than 10% of companies use the data they have in a systematic way

Demographic data accounts for 73% of data-driven marketing, versus transactional data, which represents 38% of data-driven marketing.  71& of marketers will implement a big data analytics solution over the next two years and yet 50% of them say that IT is not a strategic partner. To truly benefit from big data, it’s important for marketing to form a strategic partnership with IT or some other team that can actually implement tools to utilize the data to mine patterns and trends, which can then help marketing with future campaigns and strategies.

Visit Maryland computer consulting firm Iconic Mind for a bevy of consulting options to meet your marketing demands!

Sources:

• http://www.zdnet.com/big-data-marketing-global-survey-released-7000018947/
• http://adage.com/article/dataworks/big-data-marketing-businesses-research-report-ad-age/243378/
• http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130531112407-17102372-big-data-what-does-it-really-mean
• http://www.zdnet.com/can-big-data-technology-be-used-to-replace-creative-marketing-7000019145/
• http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/media-network-blog/2013/jun/12/what-role-big-data-marketing
• http://www.forbes.com/sites/mckinsey/2013/07/22/big-data-analytics-and-the-future-of-marketing-sales/
• http://www.forbes.com/sites/gilpress/2013/01/01/6-big-data-quotes-of-2012/
• http://www.business2community.com/big-data/big-data-and-analytics-role-in-protecting-the-financial-industry-0588646
• http://www.sas.com/software/customer-intelligence/big-data-marketing.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data
• http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2269371/data-shows-big-data-marketing-is-a-growing-field

This is a re-post article from Iconic Mind Blog.