Applying Big Data To Online Marketing

Published on February 14th, 2020

The history of commerce is replete with intuition-based decision-making. From Jack Welch to Richard Branson, many business leaders have made critical marketing and business expansion decisions through intuition.

However, big-data-driven decision-making has consistently been supplanting intuition-based decision-making.

Big data today drives a whole range of critical decisions, and online marketing is no exception. In this post, you’ll encounter a few ideas about how businesses everywhere are applying big data to online marketing.

What’s Big Data?

Put simply, big data is a lot of data, but it’s much more than that. Big data refers to an enormous amount of different types of data produced incredibly fast every passing moment.

Imagine how many likes, tweets, claps, pins, comments, saves, and shares that happened over the past one second. It’s a humongous amount. It’s big data.

The World Generates Data At A Dizzying Rate

According to DOMO, Youtube gives the world over 4,000,000 videos every minute. Google sees over 3,600,000 searches.

Twitter users generate 456,000 tweets, and Uber delivers over 45,000 trips. That’s the speed at which the world is creating data. What’s more, data creation is accelerating.

Maybe soon, the world will generate more data in one month than it’s generated since humans started recording information. But what does this have to do with digital marketing?

Online Marketing Today Vs. A Few Years Ago

In the past, all digital marketers ever did was cobble together content and publish it. As long as the articles, press releases, and blog posts had the right number of relevant keywords, they’d rank pretty quickly.

But those were the good old pre-big data days. There wasn’t much data (content) available for users. It wasn’t uncommon to find buyer intent-packed keywords with thousands of searches for which no one had created content.

Today, the reality is starkly different. Every post you write slogs through a huge amount of content toward page #1 of Google.

You have no guarantee it’ll reach the top of the SERPs. Only content that sparkles —helpful and well-optimized content — ever occupies the top spots.

It’s a whole new world with new rules. Consequently, online content marketing has become a whole different game that necessitates creation of new, better strategies.

It’s An Era Of Data-Driven Content Marketing

Researching for an article and stringing together sentences into coherent content has always required artistic skills. It’s always been an art.

But things have changed. The days of using fancy phrases and words laden with keywords are long gone.

To win in today’s extremely competitive digital space, you MUST offer intelligently crafted content. You must use scientific data to inform content creation.

And that’s where big data tools such as Bing, Baidu, and Google come into play. These tools are collecting, organizing, and analyzing data quickly and accurately.

Users are accessing original research that provides them with many valuable and actionable insights.

Look at your Google Analytics or Google Console dashboards, for example. You can easily and quickly see what posts are performing well and which ones need improvement. You can also instantly identify what keywords boast many impressions and very few clicks.

For every online marketer, this is vitally important information. Many marketers view these two big data tools as idea-rich minefields.

Using these tools is like consulting a highly competent digital marketer who provides tips you can implement now for more conversions.

Big Data Has Greatly Impacted SEO

Every SEO today agrees that big data has phenomenally changed the way they market content. It’s more about availing the right content to users just when they need it.

Fortunately, online marketers no longer need to guess what information potential customers want. There are dozens of free and paid tools that help them intelligently optimize their content.

How well are you leveraging big data? People are doing about five billion searches daily on Google and all the other search engines, according to Smart Insights.

Take another hard look at your content marketing campaigns and ask yourself whether you’re benefiting enough from big data.

Decision-Making On Pricing And Other Aspects

Many successful business leaders today are counting on big data and advanced data analytics for decision-making.

They’re gathering a lot of near-real-time data/research that’s helping them to formulate smarter online marketing strategies and other decisions.

Pricing is a critical factor when it comes to formulating offers consumers find irresistible. Businesses have always relied on aspects such as consumer demand, product cost, and competitor pricing to determine pricing.

But are these the only important considerations for smart product pricing? No, and that’s where big data comes in.

Big data provides other crucial information that support pricing-related decision-making. It recognizes that no two customers are exactly the same.

People have different purchasing habits and histories. In addition, their budgets are different, and their disposable income differs. Most importantly, consumer preferences vary across markets and niches.

Other crucial factors that pricing should take into account are the GDP growth rate, interest rate, FOREX, and more.

Without big data, it’d be very difficult to obtain all this information. But with big data, you can infuse all these factors into your pricing and other decisions and make smarter decisions.

Whether it’s marketing, production, or compliance decision-making, you can count in big data.