44 Zettabytes. That was the amount of big data present in the digital world by 2020. This is almost equal to the number of stars in our universe. And the volume of digital data is growing at 2X every two years!
Marketers today are sitting on a goldmine of information. Every marketing decision they make is no longer based on experience and intuition. Rather big data (massive data sets gathered from various resources) is the key to receiving critical information at the right time for effective decision-making.
Big data holds the potential to identify and describe the target audience with more precision than ever. While earlier, marketing efforts were restricted to tracking email subscribers or website visits. Today, marketers can accurately know their ideal customers by monitoring and analyzing their online habits, purchase history, time spent on different websites, social media interactions, search intent, and more.
Safe to say, the unavailability of data isn’t the biggest challenge marketers face anymore. Instead, how marketers use big data to drive higher lead generation and sales will define marketing success.
Here are the top 4 ways marketers can make big data an essential part of their marketing strategy.
1. Define Your ICP with Big Data
Every successful B2B marketing strategy begins with clearly defining your Ideal Customer Profile. And this is where big data help you make things easier.
With timely access to valuable information like the age, demographic, industry, job profile, or location of your customers, you can effectively target your ideal buyer. Creating data-backed ICPs will allow you to push across the right marketing message to the prospects at the right time and boost the chances of conversions
2. Personalize Customer Experience
Personalization is the foundation of a seamless customer experience. Your target buyer is exposed to a plethora of information on the internet, and your competitors are most likely using the same marketing channels to reach the same target audience as you are. So how do you set yourself apart?
By using big data to drive a personalized customer experience. It offers you timely insights into which prospects are engaging with your website, content, or social media in real time. Along with automation systems, it lets you track the topics your audience is searching for or the marketing channels they use to solve their pain points.
Equipped with these insights, you can offer them the content they need or push your ads on the right platform. With big data, you have a better chance of personalizing customer experience across multiple channels.
3. Improve Your Content Strategy
There’s no denying the fact that content works. In fact, 82% of B2B marketers actively invest in content marketing as a part of their overall strategy. But big data is the tool that can take your content marketing strategy one step further.
With in-depth insights into customers’ buying habits and online behavior, marketers can accurately track the type of content and the preferred channels that will work best for their prospects. Big data analytics lets you identify which content assets were successful in moving the customer down the sales funnel and which were not.
This way, you can focus your efforts around the content topics and channels that work and create truly compelling content that resonates with the audience.
4. Use Predictive Analysis for Lead Scoring
Another way big data can transform your marketing strategy is through predictive lead scoring. Based on historical data and predictive analysis, predictive lead scoring uses your CRM data to predict future lead behavior.
Unlike traditional methods, where lead scoring was based on the marketers’ subjectivity and intuition that often resulted in poor lead qualification, big data can dramatically increase accuracy. It identifies positive digital actions by tracking past data around closed leads. And determines if they should be weighed heavily for lead scoring.
Thereby making the process more data-driven, seamless, and aligning sales and marketing efforts for ultimate success.
Final Thoughts
Given the highly competitive B2B marketing scenario, big data can fuel your marketing efforts like no other. It is your ultimate ticket to achieving in-depth customer insights, tracking their online journey, and improving decision-making. When done right, big data analytics can help you predict trends and enhance your marketing strategy to reach your goals more effectively.