Is Your Big Data Delivering Small Value to Your Marketing?

Karl Van den Bergh, CMO, DataStax, finds out why marketers rely on big data to understand the customer and what, when, and where to deliver content to them. And is big data enough these days to really achieve your goals? 

As a marketer, you want to create campaigns that are highly personalized and provide timely content that will motivate customers to engage with your brand. To do this, you rely on big data to understand the customer and what, when, and where to deliver content to them. But is big data enough these days to really achieve your goals?

Traditionally, big data has been characterized by the "3 Vs": volume, variety, and velocity. And while these have increased over the last 10 years, big data's ability to drive value for marketers seems to be faltering. I believe this is because we're missing a "V": value. .

Why is this so hard?

A major reason is that data is only as valuable as the speed and extent to which it can be operationalized. For marketers, there is a need to have real-time, innovative and customer-responsive applications that drive the right messages in the right moment.

You've seen how companies like Amazon, Netflix, and Sony are setting a much higher bar by using data to raise customer expectations around what "customer experience" and "marketing" now is, and every company must step up and deliver. But to do that, you must have real-time personalization at scale and this is where big data falls short. Big data is not the same thing as real-time data.

Marketers need real-time capabilities to interact with customers and big data alone just doesn't provide that. Now, it certainly can drive good marketing via segmentation and process optimization and targeting, but to provide a rich, personalized experience in the moment for customers (which is the new standard for marketing) you must also have real-time data. To manage this, you need a data management platform that can extract the full value of both big data and real-time data to engage customers at the right moment in their buyer's journey.

How do you create real-time marketing that will have impact? It happens in three steps: data influx from a large volume of sources, processed in real-time; real-time analysis that surfaces powerful and immediate insights from that data; and finally, technology that automates this process so that it happens in real-time, in the moment that matters for customers.

Which brings me to my next point, without a . As a marketer, there are key things you need to look for in a data management platform:

Is it designed to power your applications with comprehensive data?

You want a data platform that can handle all types of workloads-business operations, search, analytics, etc.,in an integrated platform without having to deal with multiple systems for pieces of data.

Does it integrate big data and real-time data at scale?

Remember you need both big data and real-time data to make your real-time marketing initiatives work. and do it in a way that doesn't make your database administrators worry about extracting, transferring, and loading data.

Can it handle all different types of customer-related data?

The best data management systems can incorporate all data models, including graph, key-value, document, and column. This gives you the flexibility to process and analyze data in multiple ways, which ultimately translates into a much richer experience and relationship with the customer.

Is it always on?

This is becoming a key differentiator between data management systems. and being able to scale without increasing your chances of a failure. Features such as "cross data center replication" allow this to happen and allow your company to handle the distributed, quickly growing, always-on nature of cloud applications.

Can you use the information to act fast, in real time?

-that is, to act in the moment of the customer's current interaction. It provides you everything you know about that customer right now (from his/her most recent social media interaction to his/her last credit card purchase) to produce an amazing customer experience right when he/she expects it.

Remember: . They respond to marketing that meets them in the right moment, when and where they need you.

For example, eBay needed to deliver a personalized and engaging customer experience to its diverse and passionate community of individual buyers and sellers. But it was hampered by the rapid growth of its data and its inability to search and analyze data at extreme scale and in real time for personalization. By choosing a data management platform that can handle real-time data at scale, eBay now powers highly accurate and personalized search results. Its marketers meet customers with relevant data based on the customer's highly personalized experience with the brand. A key to eBay's extraordinary success is its ability to turn the enormous volumes of data it generates into useful insights for its customers. It wouldn't happen without their data management platform.

The future is moving toward an evolution where big data becomes "fast actions", driven through applications with distributed data moving and learning at machine speeds

This will drive corporate and the marketing department's value in the form of personalized experiences and improved operational and capital efficiency.

To be able to support this kind of evolution, as well as information dispersion and scale, and drive powerful, relevant marketing, rethink the technology infrastructure on which you're building and deploying business-critical applications. Move to a modern platform that puts big data and real-time data at the center. You can do this by choosing a data management platform that allows you to leverage fast actions via big data, legacy information, and real-time operational data. In the next few years, the effective use of data could make or break your company's ability to successfully compete and win. Marketing can take the lead by choosing platforms that already do this.

Source: Is Your Big Data Delivering Small Value to Your Marketing?