Did you know that 90% of all data has been generated over the last 2 years? Big Data has been an important topic in the marketing scene for quite some time. It has been a major challenge for Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) because it’s not easy to organize and extract useful insights from massive amounts of structured and unstructured data.
From years of interaction with marketing service firms, I have come to notice that the emphasis on big data is vastly misplaced. Here are four key points that will show you how the data value is shifting and making an impact on the role of marketers.
Smart Data Over Big Data
Large organizations may be excited over the idea of “big data,” but it isn’t nearly as important as “right data” or “smart data.” Data is of no use if you don’t get any useful insights from it and in order to achieve just that, you should be able to integrate big data with small data. Small data will give you calibration and context that big data can’t. Smart data is a combination of both small data and big data.
Personalization by Digital Advertisers and Financial Services
The Financial Service industry has started to strategically use big data. It has enabled these organizations to customize and compartmentalize their one-to-one marketing endeavors. Using big data has helped them to carve out a specific audience segment and mold their services and products accurately to meet those requirements.
Another industry that has benefited a lot from big data is digital advertising. With programmatic ad purchasing, it has personalized digital ads by offering relevant content to each consumer. Intrusive ads or ads glossed over on the websites have now become a thing of the past. Today, they have integrated it seamlessly into the content.
A Shift in Focus for Companies
Companies today mostly start with the data and see what they find. It’s similar to finding a needle in a haystack. Begin with the fundamentals, business drivers, and the strategy, and work your way back to determine the best sets of data that will give you the insights for your direction. Sure, big data is a great technology, but you will only derive true value when you pair it with domain expertise.
Converting Big Data into Smart Data for CMOs
Speed and agility are crucial. Start fast, wherever you are. If you wait it out until it’s perfect, it may be outdated before you even launch it. There are three effective ways CMOs can retool to convert big data into actionable and insightful smart data:
i. Execute Scalability
Technology is growing at a rapid rate and data is multiplying by the nanosecond. You need to accept the fact that you will never get it perfect. Learn to revise, update, refresh, and move on.
ii. Acknowledge Collaboration
If you want to do this right, be willing to form partnerships and grow a team or network of companies that will push you forward. You can’t get everything from a single company. If you wait around until you attain perfection, you will end up missing out because you will simply fail to keep up. There are several projects in progress with clients and technology, data players, and analytics.
iii. Develop a Playbook
No set of data is identical, and each one will provide different insights, but when you have a playbook to help arrive at smart data, it will aid you in future enterprises when dealing with big data. A playbook will also help familiarize and socialize the conversion of big data to smart data among your team members.
Smart Data Collection
Organizations that do not understand Big Data often accumulate everything in a Data Lake, Data Warehouse, or what often amounts to Data Swamp. Most of these organizations go around thinking these historical data are precious treasures while in truth, it lacks value, quantity, or may not even be in the correct format.
A better way to use their resources is to collect relevant data to their business. Storing, organizing, and governing data will cost you money and time. An efficient strategy would be to collect Smart Data instead of all types of data. When a business focuses on smart data collection, it is able to come up with cost-effective solutions to process it. If you only selectively gather important data, it will ease the employment of Self-Service BI tools and prevent staff from getting overwhelmed with multitudes of extraneous information.
When you gather Smart Data, you are doing a lot more than simply removing excess data. This kind of data comes from diverse sources, and an intelligent organization can merge these resources in order to start Business Intelligence models that are laser-focused.
Smart data is the future and any business can benefit immensely from it. Small and medium-size companies should not let the idea of smart date scare them. The trick is to act fast (gather and analyze quickly) so that it becomes easy to beat competition and take smarter decisions.
