Customers are the foundation of any business. A business has no scope without its customers. Initially, knowing what your customer is like and what are his likes and dislikes was impossible as everything was offline. And you cannot ask your customers to fill in the form asking for these details when they come to your shop to do shopping.
But since the way we shop today has changed and now it’s more online than going out to the mall and fishing for the things out there. Sitting in your favorite couch at home with a bowl of popcorn and a glass of cold drink and seeing through all the available options of headphones on your laptop screen is a much better deal than walking down the malls.
So, basically online shopping era has benefitted us a lot of ease in shopping and the cherry on the cake is the Home Delivery of the items. Much to our surprise, this online shopping era has benefitted the business more than to us.
Big Data a boon to Marketing Strategists –
Shocking right! But the logic behind is very simple. And that is Big Data Analytics. All these online shopping sites asks you to make an account on their websites. Ever wondered why! The reason is by this they maintain the data of their every customer. The data not just consists of the information you filled in but also the information of what all items you have purchased. And the list of the items you have window shopped. And this gives them the idea about your likes and dislikes. They use all of this data of every customer to make their marketing plans and strategies by doing a data analytics of it.
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A very simple example of it is the special sales on the festivals. They analyze this data on many conditions of which some are as follows:
- Time of the year when their website is viewed maximum.
- Categories of all those items which were viewed by the customers on the max rush day.
- Count of customers on each of the individual categories.
- Locations from where they got the maximum views.
- Amount of purchase and amount of window shopping.
And they are many more such conditions that they put on that Big Data comprising of the customer details to find out what type of marketing strategy they could use at which time of the year for which region of the world.
Contents of Big Data Being Collected –
If we dig dipper into the data that companies collect about their customers, we would get to know that companies try to collect all the information related to the personas of their customers. Whatever we buy can be related to our personas in a lot of manner. Persona of a person tells you about the special characteristics of that person, which could be very helpful for any business. The information about the personas are essential characters that forms various parts of your customer base. The data contains in-depth knowledge of demographics, motivators, sources of influence, average income and so on.
Some of the demographic characteristics that are collected by the companies are as follows:
- Age;
- Gender;
- Ethnicity;
- Family and Marital Status;
- Employment Status;
- Income Level;
Some of the personal information collected that we do not identify are:
- Geographic Locations
- Lifestyle
- Interests
- Past Behaviors
- Content consumption habits
- Influences for purchase
- Emotional response to the events
- Reason for interaction with a company
- Hopes from the company
- Personal Goals
- Places they search for product information
Better Recognition of Customers –
In any business it is very important to identify all the valuable customers of it. Traditionally, the buyers who spent the most money were by default taken as the Most Valuable People. But with time this technique failed as, these people came out to be the least loyal over the period of long time. Hence, this caused an outbreak of pressure for the sales and marketing personnel to find out the loyal customers and to make strategies accordingly.
Speaking of the present time. Big Data has emerged as Boon for Marketing and Sales Professionals. Since they have all the information about the personas of their customers, just by doing some metric calculation on the data could give them a very good insights about their customers. Some of the metrics that are performed by companies are as follows:
- Average Purchase Size – it is about the amount the customers spend on a typical purchase. This metric is done for each persona by considering that the people buy goods also seeing the value of it for themselves.
- Lifetime Value – it is about calculating the total amount of money the buyer persona spend with you over their lifetime. This would indicate about the relationship you have with your customers
- Acquisition Costs – this metric is the indicative of how much a business spend on their marketing and sales to get the customers.
- Retention Costs – this metric tells about the costs that the business bear in order to keep the customers in the contact.
- Customer Happiness – this metric indicates about the satisfaction in the customers regarding your product. It can also help you distinguish between the happy and unhappy customers, and the difference of views in them. The result could help in revealing flaws, suggesting improvements and many other things.
- Value Alignment – this metric lets you know whether the customers you think potential for your business are actually buying your products or not. And if not then who is buying your products can also be recorded. Hence, depending on the metric results you can check for the alignment between the customer personas and the purchasing characteristics.
By using the Big Data Analytics, you can transform your business into a more customer centric one than you have ever imagined. Having so many rivals in the market, you need to go beyond the transactional details of your customers and dig deeper about their sentiments and motivations. Big Data Analytics is not just about knowing a general trend but it’s more about knowing and taking care of you each and every individual customer. With proper application of data analytic techniques and marketing strategies, business now can customize their offers for every individual customer, instead of segmenting the customers into similar interests groups.
Why Companies turning to Big Data Analytics –
This has become a common phenomenon in the market. Whether small or big, all companies are turning to Big Data Analytics to extract value from the data. They somehow believe and is also proven that big data analytics can give you much deeper insights about your customer than any other traditional methods. The 3 reasons why Big Data proves to be a great opportunity for your business is:
- Availability of new tools in the market which help analyze the data in real time. Data sensors which collect maximum information about performance of machine sand electronics are also among these new tools.
- Since, now we have the ability to analyze the data, it increases the capability of a company to extract more important results to increase the profits.
- Now we even have new genres of data related to the customer sentiments from the social platforms. Though these don’t seem to be of much value to a business but they prove to be beneficial to business to know how their products are being rated.
- Warehousing this huge amounts of data will only lead to huge costs to business. Hence, Cloud Storage is now becoming a more reality because of its feasibility and accessibility.
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Benefits of using Big Data Analytics –
Big Data Analytics has benefitted business in many ways, from improving their marketing and sales strategies to knowing about their products rating. Most important of all is that it has helped them to understand their customers in much better manner than ever before. It has helped in overcoming the challenges that were being faced by marketing department while using the traditional methods.
In the above lines of the blog, it had been clear to you that businesses are using Big Data Analytics to know their customers in vivid manner. 3 major benefits of using Big Data Analytics to understand your business customers are:
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- Customer Satisfaction – Since, by the use of Big Data Analytics has helped businesses to know their customers completely, hence they can work accordingly to increase the customer satisfaction. Eventually generating fans for your business and an improved rating about your products.
- Big Data Analytics helps you in taking care of each and every customer individually, hence, sales could be increased by giving them the best deal at the best time.
- Since businesses know everything in and out about their customers, they can retain them for longer time by showing them that their business understand their need in a better manner and can provide them the products suiting their requirement.
The above blog told you about How Big Data Analytics is super beneficial for Marketing as it helps you to know your customers in a much better manner. But knowing how it helps, and what all data it collects is not enough. After all, it’s Big Data and no one knows how big this Big Data is. Hence, there are some ways to use this Big Data Analytics for knowing your customer, which I would be discussing in my next Big Data Blog.
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Till them let me know whether you liked my this blog or not through the comments below.