Data is the most valuable tool in your business. Based on a Gartner survey, 73% of organizations have invested or plan to invest in big data within the next two years.
It’s now the responsibility of both marketing and IT departments to translate data into profitable insights. How your team integrates data into a strategy will help determine your business’s growth.
Equipped with a dash of business acumen and a pinch of creativity, companies can persuade buyers to purchase their products and services. Compelling statements backed by credible data will lead to an increase in conversion rates and ROIs.
Nedra Klein Weinreich, the president and founder of Weinreich Communications, agrees that storytelling is essential in our face-paced society.
“I believe that the age of the 30-second spot and interruption marketing is just about over. It’s so easy now to skip over TV commercials with our DVRs, block online banner ads, and tune out the pitches being thrown at us constantly,” she says.
Right now, the marketer’s challenge is to create a data-driven recipe to drive sales growth, while presenting consistent brand messages to customers.
It’s a great opportunity for organizations to transcend traditional norms. Companies that embrace this new way of thinking can separate themselves from competitors and gain an undeniable spot in the marketplace.
Explore these five ways to align data and storytelling into your business strategy:
1. Revamp Your Buyer Personas
To target the most
Technology has transformed the way companies use data. Companies need more data to streamline their marketing campaigns and target their products for the right audience. But it isn’t just about gathering information – companies also need to be able to use this information and integrate it to their service.
Firstly, the main problem is deciding which data should be selected. The data, explaining customers’ desires and needs, is important to be collected while most of the enterprises are confusing about what data they should concentrate on. A recent Gartner report (2014) stresses that 64% of firms raced to plan or launch a Big Data project, though they did not have enough professional knowledge yet. To understand what customers need through Big Data possibly turns into the core of companies’ target. The large data volumes and different varieties of data lead to data complexity.
The era that we live in, in the year 2015 is considered the “big data” era. Industries all over the world are analyzing data and determining marketing and business processes to attract consumers. Data analysis which started off on a much smaller scale today can be used in much broader aspects from coupons you receive in your email, to advertisements you see when you use applications on your smart phone data also can be used to determine the frequent of a customer to a particular store or website. These are both processes of data analytics being used and conveyed in a way to attract customers or satisfy consumer needs. Data analysis focuses on finding the specific data to answer your question, understanding the processes underlying the data, discovering the important patterns in the data, and then communicating your results to gain optimal results. Data is not a new concept in any form, the technology of today’s world makes obtaining and analyzing data easier. The recent decades have seen a fundamental change in the model of data analysis. IMB Tech Trends Report (2011) identified business analytics as one of the four major technology trends in the 2010s. According to Chen (2012) Business intelligence began its practice in business and IT communities just a few decades ago in the 1990s. In the 2000s business analytics was introduced to represent the key analytical components in business intelligence. The business intelligence and data analytics previously adopted in an
In this modern age of constant technological advancement and business innovation, a relatively new feature has unlocked more potential for businesses to improve: Big Data. Big Data can be defined in many different ways. It has become important primarily for business decision making.
Big data is a popular term used to describe the exponential growth and availability of data, both structured and unstructured. And big data may be as important to business – and society – as the Internet has become. Why? More data may lead to more accurate analyses. More accurate analyses may lead to more confident decision making. And better decisions can mean greater operational efficiencies.
Data is a valuable corporate resource; it has real, measurable value. The purpose of data is to aid evidence-based decision-making. Accurate, timely data is critical to accurate, timely decisions. Most corporate assets are carefully managed and data is no exception. Data is the foundation of our decision-making, so we must also carefully manage data to ensure that we know where it is, can rely upon its accuracy, and can obtain it when and where we need it.
“Technology creates visibility across the business, and enterprise-wide operational practices are essential to optimal efficiency and effectiveness. The strategic implementation of business intelligence tools and analytics, along with cross-departmental alignment, can transform data into meaningful, useful information for critical analysis. Proactive and investigative BI reporting techniques can help recognize new business opportunities and provide firms with a competitive industry advantage.” - Scott Lundstrom, group vice president and general manager of IDC Financial, Government and Health Insights (Sungard, 2014a).
The concept of using data to influence decision-making certainly isn’t new. It’s been adopted, implemented and utilized by each and every one of us. It can be as basic as using visual data to pick the best apple out of the bunch, or as complex as using customer resource management (CRM) data to create a geographic heat map of customers and prospects to better understand where to spend an advertising budget.
Big data can help you gather pertinent information about your customers. It’s the foundation to acquiring the right customers. Learn more about your customers:
Successful users and leaders of Big Data: Over the last decade, organizations thriving on their competition by leverage analytics as the tool for their business decisions. Big Data technologies have enabled businesses to get insights that make them competitive. Following are some of the companies who have performed much better, even in the recession era, in their verticals by leverage Big Data.
“Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine.” was introduced by Peter Sondergaard during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2011. In fact, data is like oil! It has value, but it needs to be extracted and refined to get the true value from it.
In the marketing industry it’s always smart to take advantage of opportunities to gain more customers while at the same time looking for weaknesses amongst their competitors. These are the building blocks on which corporations strive to survive and flourish. Once a company has produced a flagship product they gain name recognition along with customer loyalty and a strong following, which usually has a deep connection to the company’s product. This connection is so immersed into a product they provide free advertisement via word of mouth, social media or the wearing of logos on their clothing.
Big Data is changing the way business decisions are made. It is no longer a passing fad and if companies are not extracting insights from the data collected, they will be left behind by their competition.
Data are a vital organizational resource that needs to be managed like other important business assets. Today’s business enterprises cannot survive or succeed without quality data about their internal operations and external environment. This growth drives corporations to analyze every bit of information that is extracted from huge data warehouses for competitive advantage. This has turned the data storage and management function into a key strategic role of information age.
“You can uncover key criteria and specific business needs that are important for your marketing.”