How the Most Successful Marketers are Using Big Data

Big data analytics are changing the way that businesses handle their marketing endeavors. You might even have a data collection strategy yourself that’s helped you make changes to your business model. However, do you understand why these changes are being made?

If there’s one thing that big data is good for, it’s helping you mold your business approach to suit the needs of your market. However, knowing trends and understanding why they occur are two entirely different things. Understanding why and how trends start is arguably more important than knowing what these trends are. By knowing what causes shifts in demand for your product or service, you can predict the future of your industry and model your practices accordingly.

More importantly, you want to improve performance and sales. Understanding the root of the problem is one of the most vital ways to find faults in your current practices and resolve them. This is why it’s especially important that you pay attention to why your consumers like your product, and how you can use this to your advantage when onboarding new prospects.

Here’s an example, as explained by Inc:

If 30% of the people who engage with the content on [a] sales page leave, for example, there's a big difference between knowing whether they leave because the sales package is unclear or the price is too high. Or many of them simply can't figure out how to buy. Or whether they were serious shoppers in the first place.

As you might guess, doing so is much easier said than done. One of the best ways to do so is to integrate customer surveys into your strategy. This helps your business gather insight into how the consumer reacts to your services or products, allowing you to shape your business model to better leverage their reactions.

Of course, there are reasons why customer surveys aren’t done. The primary reason is that most consumers find responding to surveys a hassle. They’ll simply be annoyed by requests to respond to a survey, and ignore them or mark them as spam. Other times, they might even lie about their practices. While you might think they have no reason to lie, the Internet is a realm that breeds off of anonymity. The nature of the web doesn’t foster honesty, and online surveys can potentially be bogged down by useless results that can be misleading.

One way to get the best results from an online customer survey is to offer some sort of incentive for them to respond. If people feel their time is worth the incentive, you’ll not only get results, but they’re more likely to be true. This can include a free 30-day trial of a service or a sample of a new product. Still, there will always be people who simply respond to surveys specifically for the incentive, and not to help you. You should be prepared to take any responses to your customer surveys with a grain of salt.

Basically, data analytics should be augmented alongside some other method of data collection that determines how and why people are interested in your product. This can lead to more leads and more profits, if implemented correctly.