Big Data Marketing Offers Critical Insight-But a Distributed Marketing Technology Is Key to Success

Marketing technology firms continue to offer credible evidence that the analytical insight gained through Big Data will be a huge factor for organizations in the near future.

Why? Consider this statistic: the amount of data an enterprise collects is expected to grow 650% over the next five years. It’s statistics like this that make it impossible to ignore what “Big Data Marketing” can bring to the bottom line for a business. It’s the key to long-term sales growth.

The growing technological and analytical capability of managing and using this unprecedented amount of enterprise data will continue to explode to all new levels in the coming years. Big Data, as the term is coined, will shift businesses from managing and observing “data transactions” to also managing and observing “data interactions.”

What does this mean? It means that businesses will be able to assess the needed data points that are crucial in understanding when a consumer will buy, and why. This extraordinary shift in technology continues to evolve at fast rates due to rapid advancements in processing power, data storage, and tracking analytics, integrated with newer, robust distribution and communication channels.

In order for companies to truly embrace Big Data and wrap their arms around what this concept can do for their sales teams, a multi-channel distributed marketing platform is needed so that all branding collateral, content, and marketing efforts can be centralized for the organization. More importantly, because of the substantial progression of communication and distribution channels, a distributed marketing technology helps optimize content distribution across varying forms of media including email, mobile, microsites, and social media. Organizations that do not implement this type of technology will struggle to collect the data points that are necessary to achieve profitable success and will be at competitive disadvantage in the near future.

These facts are hard to dispute. The industry is already witnessing a 40% annual increase in marketing technology spends, and leading analysts are also projecting that by the end of 2017 the CMO will spend more on technology than the CIO.

Big Data is still considered a buzz word. It still is not full defined, nor accepted by all marketers or industry professionals. However, the evidence continues to be reported that Big Data isn’t going anywhere. I recently read an article about some additional studies that were released this summer by Lattice Engines on this very topic. Their survey stated that 89% of executives believe sales reps miss opportunities because they cannot keep up with the information about customers and prospects, and also noted that 90% expect there would be great benefits to sales if insight was automated and delivered through one system.

This leads me back to my belief that the formula for success for marketers in the future is going to be quite simple: Bigger, Richer Data Sets + Real Time Analytics + Personalized Multi-Channel Marketing = a Higher ROI.