Challenges and opportunities

The ability of data-focused marketing strategies and decision making is now being recognized
broadly, and there is growing enthusiasm for the concept of “big data”. While the concept of big
data is real there still is a big gap between its potential and its realization. Big data though is
becoming a key basis of competition, supporting new waves of productivity, growth, innovation
and consumer surplus as long as the right policies and enablers are in place.

Much data today is not natively in structured format: i.e. tweets and blogs are weakly structured
pieces of text, while images and videos are structured for storage and display, but not for semantic
content and search, transforming such content into a structured format is a major challenge for
almost all industries and their respective sectors. Though the values of data explodes when it can
be linked with other data, thus data integration is a major creator of value. Since most of the data
is directly generated in digital format today, it is an opportunity and a challenge both to influence
the creation to facilitate later linkage and to automatically link previously created data. Data
analysis, organization, retrieval, and modeling are other foundational challenges. Data analysis is
a clear holdup in many applications, both due to lack of scalability of the underlying algorithms
and due to the complexity of the data that needs to be analyzed. Finally, presentation of the results
and its interpretation by non-technical domain experts is crucial to extracting actionable
knowledge.

Challenges:

While the potential benefits of big data are real and significant to every sector, especially in
framing marketing strategies, there remain many technical challenges that must be addressed to
fully realize it’s potential. Following are the possible major challenges: The sheer size of the data,
of course is a major challenge for marketers and is the one most easily recognized. However there
are others. Industry analysis companies like to point out that there are challenges not just in
volume, but also in variety and velocity, and that companies should focus on the first of these. By
variety, we usually mean heterogeneity of data types, representation, and semantic interpretation.
By velocity, we mean both the rate at which data arrive and the time in which it must be acted
upon. While these three are important to know, there are additional important requirements to be
aware of such as privacy and usability.
Big data has to be managed in context which is very important in order to frame marketing
strategies, now this may be noisy, heterogeneous and not include an upfront model. Doing so raises
the need to track provenance and to handle uncertainty and error: topics that are crucial to success,
and yet rarely mentioned in the same breath as big data.

Opportunities:

The most effective way marketers can leverage big data in their marketing strategy is, by
centralizing and synthesizing their fragmented customer data sources across their point of sale
systems, ecommerce platforms, mobile applications and social accounts with advanced consumer
management technology.

By combining big data with an integrated marketing management strategy, marketing

organizations can make a substantial impact in these key areas:

 Customer engagement. Big data can deliver insight into not just who your customers are,
but where they are, what they want, how they want to be contacted and when.

 Customer retention and loyalty. Big data can help you discover what influences customer
loyalty and what keeps them coming back again and again.

 Marketing optimization/performance. With big data, you can determine the optimal
marketing spend across multiple channels, as well as continuously optimize marketing
programs through testing, measurement and analysis

The single most effective way marketers can leverage big data to increase revenue is to, Use big
data to match sales reps to ideal customers. Integrating each of these customer data silos into a
single, synthesized data set, delivers an exceptional, full view of their customers based on their
purchases, interactions and preferences. This, in turn, provides powerful intelligence to drive
advanced segmentation, sophisticated personas and strategic targeted campaigns to engage and
motivate consumers. It also allows brands to identify and understand their most valuable customers
across a spectrum of dimensions beyond mere purchase value, allowing them to foster their brand
affinity. The key to achieving this is adopting a consumer management platform that can integrate
with your current cross channel consumer system in order to streamline the data from your
customer’s digital footprints.