Digital Ecosystem Playbook#21- Empower your Marketing Analytics Engine

"What gets measured gets managed"

Peter Drucker

Data, in today’s business and technology world, is indispensable. Businesses that can analyze this data for gaining insights have an advantage over those which operate in a data dark environment. Big data refers to the ever-increasing volume, velocity, variety, variability and complexity of information. For marketing organizations, big data is the fundamental consequence of the new marketing landscape, born from the digital world we now live in.The term "big data" doesn’t just refer to the data itself; it also refers to the capabilities and competencies associated with storing and analyzing such huge data sets to support a level of decision making that is more accurate and timely than anything previously attempted – big-data-driven decision making.

Take a health check of your analytics engine

1. How much internal processes and customer data are you collecting as an organization?
2. How do you analyze the data to get insights?
3. How do you share the insights across multiple BU's of your company to optimize the 'data to decision' cycle?
4. How mature is your data analytics engine- do you analyze what happened, what is happening or what will happen? Optimize for predictive analytics maturity state.

Leverage big data to become better at marketing

Having big data doesn’t automatically lead to better marketing – but the potential is there. By combining cutting edge analytics with big data,organizations can make a substantial impact in these key areas:

1. New growth pockets, alliances for ecosystem or platform strategy- Data helps in knowing where your customers are buying from, which platforms you should partner with. Is there an opportunity for your business to orchestrate a platform or to participate in an existing ecosystem. Xiaomi managed to sell millions of smartphones in India when it first entered the geography by exclusive partnerships with Indian e-commerce players. New closed ecosystems and content aggregators—become the "home" for consumers and aim to control access to customers and the collection of information, and relegating service/product providers to playing utility roles
2. Customer journey end to end. Big data can deliver insight into not just who your customers are, but where they are, what they want, how they want to be contacted and touch points they have with your business. CMOs need the meaningful insights that big data can provide; but so do front-line store managers, and call center phone staff, and sales associates, and so on and so on. What good is insight if it stays within the confines of the board room? Get it into the hands of those who can act on it. You can even leverage AR/VR and AI chatbot technologies to redefine your customer experience.
3. Measure Campaign Success- Big data can help you discover the success of your online campaigns- search engine optimization, mobile first strategy, email marketing campaigns. Marketing mix modeling done rightly can help you save and optimize your marketing dollars. Have diagnostic tools to benchmark current campaign statistics versus best-in-class
4. Channel optimization. With big data, you can determine the optimal marketing spend across multiple channels, as well as continuously optimize marketing programs through testing, measurement and analysis.Big data affords you the opportunity to dig deeper and deeper into the data, peeling back layers to reveal richer insights. The insights you gain from your initial analysis can be explored further, with richer, deeper insights emerging each time. This level of insight can help you develop specific strategies and actions to drive growth.

There has been an enormous growth in the field of Big Data analytics with the benefits of the technology. There are many other industries which use big data analytics, however e-commerce, ride hailing, banking/Fintech are seen as the field making the maximum use of Big Data Analytics.

 Data scientists will be in demand

 Importance of big data analytics leads to intense competition and increased demand for big data professionals. Data Science and Analytics is an evolving field with huge potential. Data analytics help in analyzing the value chain of business and gain insights. Data analytics experts provide the organizations a chance to learn about the opportunities for the business. There are huge talent requirements and significance of big data analytics in different fields and industries is only going to go north. As business start building your data analysts workforce.

Sidhartha Sharma

(views are personal)