Marketers have access to more data than ever. With the right tools, you can turn this data into insights — learning in near-real-time what your customers are interested in. 

Big data — an umbrella term for extremely large datasets, too big to process with conventional algorithms — is probably one of the most valuable tools for marketers that want to make more informed decisions. 

Here’s why big data is essential for marketing campaigns — and how any business can take advantage of it.

How Big Data Can Supercharge a Marketing Campaign

For marketers, the wide variety of big data available means that it can help to solve a range of problems.

1. Personalization

One of the most common use-cases for big data is in ad and content personalization. With enough info on a customer’s interests and preferences, you can deliver much more relevant advertisements or content to every visitor, web user or email list subscriber. 

For example, one business may use big data to personalize email ads, sending subscribers links to articles that line up with content they’ve browsed before.

Some businesses, like Kroger, have even used personalization to optimize direct mail coupons.

Using big data to drive personalization in your next marketing campaign can help you deliver your ads to the right audience. Being able to deliver more relevant ads will help you ensure that you’re actually reaching customers interested in what your business offers.

2. Audience Research

Big data can also help you learn more about how your audience shops — taking much of the guesswork out of campaign design. With the right data, it’s also possible to segment your audience more effectively and measure consumer response to your marketing campaigns. 

With better information on how people are responding to your campaign, you can more effectively bid for ads or target valuable segments. It will also be easier to identify when a campaign isn’t working, or if one option in an A/B test is much more effective than another.

For example, one business may discover that geotargeting a specific region in a campaign provides a much better ROI than attempting to reach customers in the business’s entire service area.

The same data can also help you more effectively price your products. Most businesses make thousands of pricing decisions every year — having the best available data will allow your business to price closer to what your audience is willing to pay.

3. Improving Customer Relationships

Big data can also help a business to build stronger relationships with its customer base. By using big data, you can respond to customers faster, adapting quickly to changes in audience preferences or needs.

Better data can mean more loyal customers as a result. Applying big data can be a winning strategy for businesses that have struggled with appealing to existing customers or generating repeat purchases.

A growing number of CRM platforms are adding in native support for big data analytics — meaning that applying big data to CRM may be as simple as selecting the right tool.

Big Data Challenges

There are some risks to relying on big data, however. Awareness of these pitfalls will help a business make the most of its data.

The more sensitive data you hold onto, the more damaging a data breach or hack can be for your business. 

Because every business that stores customer data is a target for hackers, you will need to pay close attention to how you keep that data secure. Investing in cybersecurity technology or partnering with an IT services provider that can secure your data will be essential. 

Awareness of some common cybersecurity weak points can also make it easier to defend business data.

Processing all that data can be a time-consuming and expensive process, as well. More data means more storage space. It also means that data quality can be harder to guarantee.

With big data, it’s not unusual for businesses to struggle more with cleaning up low-quality data than they do with simpler, smaller datasets.

Using Big Data for Informed Decision-Making

With more data, it’s easier for a business to make better decisions about marketing campaigns and advertising. Information about customers, business financials and internal information can all help to improve the effectiveness of a campaign.

Many marketing and customer relationship management tools are starting to offer big data analytics features. This means that taking advantage of big data may be as simple as selecting the right platform.

Eleanor is the editor-in-chief of Designerly. She’s also a freelance web designer with a focus on customer experience. She lives in Philly with her husband and dog, Bear.