Why Big Data Analytics Really Matters to Marketers

You’ve spent countless hours and probably a lot of dollars (social media marketing is expected to hit $3.1B by 2014) building meaningful social media marketing programs. If implemented properly, they have helped increase conversations happening about your brand. But now what? How do you measure the business impact of your ongoing social media engagement to justify the marketing spend? The old adage in marketing is very true in social media, you waste 50% of all of your marketing spend; the challenge is finding the effective 50%.

Sure, you can measure the stuff that fits into a spreadsheet like number of new followers, re-tweets, link click-through, Klout scores, or any other number of web click things. For networks like Twitter, you can diagram the network, identify reputation, prestige and reach, and look at path lengths between nodes in the network.  A lot of folks already do that.

But rather than just social network stats and graphs, what you really want to know is how social media is addressing your business problems. Is it driving more revenue, reducing customer churn, turning more visitors into customers or increasing customer satisfaction?

The truth is that, historically, there’s been no easy way to tell how your social media programs are really affecting the bottom line. In order to understand the actual impact of social media, you need to be able to look at your social media results in conjunction with other data sources. And the only way to do that is by using Big Data analytics.

Big Data What?

To fully understand why you should care about Big Data analytics, first you need to understand what Big Data is. It’s exactly the problem you’re facing right now – it’s lots of data from a lot of different sources, it’s coming in faster than ever and it’s not the sort of data that fits into Excel. A lot of this is what as known as “semi-structured” or “unstructured data”. Its your social media feeds, its your call center records, its any and every type of data that you might want to harness and make sense of to help make fact-based business decisions.

So what can you do with it?

Quite simply, big data analytics makes it possible for your company to integrate, analyze and visualize all of this data. You can use it to understand customer sentiment from social media programs, and get a more complete view of what your customers are actually doing in response to social media. You can identify the best influencer hubs based on quantified results rather than best guess. You can identify missed revenue opportunities and better target advertising.  All made possible because you were able to see a complete view of prospects and customer across social media and other customer touch points like call centers and website interactions together with in-store or web store transactions. It actually allows you to better understand the “results” from all of this social media attention. Because you can correlate disparate data sets, you can actually ask your data if and how positive customer sentiment drives revenue, and who are the best influencers, not simply the most prolific.

Great, but how?

In addition to all of your social media data, you have lots of different data sources in your business that contains customer and/or prospect interaction or transaction data.  Customer/prospect information from salesforce.com and marketing campaign data from Marketo. Clickstream data from Omniture. Transaction system records. Call center logs. Product catalog data. The list is endless. Individually each of those data sources provide a finite amount of insight and are typically analyzed alone and can only provide visibility on that single data source. Correlating these datasets is the key to proving the worth of your social media programs.

The magic happens when you combine these datasets with each other to ask the sorts of questions you’ve always wondered. “When X retweets me, is there a spike in my sales?” “When Y posts on my timeline, is there an increase at my call center?” “Does my advertising campaign help drive people to our Facebook page?” The resulting metrics allow you to tweak various social media, traditional marketing, or advertising campaigns so that your social media “score” goes up. This is what we call having a 360-degree view of your business (see diagram below), and it’s only possible with big data analytics.

The entire process boils down to three steps:

1.    Data integration – getting all the data in one place for ease of analysis

2.    Analytics – actually transforming and analyzing the data so that you can correlate between social interaction and resulting transactions

3.    Visualization – visual representations of your analysis to easily see important correlations and actual results

Now that you know there is a way to get from social media metrics to meaningful business decisions, it’s time to make the case once and for all that social media programs are an integral part of the marketing mix, and ultimately, business strategy. To do that, you must capture, correlate, analyze, and visualize all of your relevant data sets.  Otherwise, you’re simply looking at your business through a soda straw with little understanding of what really affects your bottom line and why. And you won’t see the competition coming until they hit you.

Posted in: Big Data, Others