Dive Into Big Data To Make A Giant Splash

If you were to walk into the paddock at a Formula 1 race, you would be amazed not just at the noise coming from the cars racing around the track but at the activities of the engineers monitoring the race. They wouldn’t be leaning over the fence cheering on their drivers. And they won’t even be watching the leaders on some huge television screen. Instead, they’ll be hunched over their laptops reviewing the data streaming in from the team’s cars.

Altogether, a Formula 1 car has more than 120 sensors which record in real time more than 500 parameters from the temperature of the engine to the pressure of the tires. That data is sent by telemetry back to the engineers in the pits and to the teams’ factories around the world. Using that data, the engineers can predict tire wear and engine failure, and they can send information to their drivers advising them when to make their pit stops and how hard to push the engine.

That process of real-time data collection, management, analysis and action make the difference between winning a championship and losing it. For businesses, they make the difference between sales won and opportunities lost.

We’ve never had more access to data than we do today. The Big Data accessible from the Internet allows us to collect, record and analyze every aspect of every customer’s actions. We can collect demographic data from social media sites, match it to information we already possess concerning buyer habits and preferences, and track the purchase and research process across multiple platforms to see what information leads are looking for and whether they’re absorbing it. We can see what they do before they buy,  and we can see what they do last before they turn away.

We can even apply the same methods to our competitors’ customers. After Nedbank, a financial services provider in South Africa, began retrieving Dig Data from social media sites, the company was able to spot competitors’ customers who were ripe for poaching, intervene with personalized offers and bring them over.

Big Data Builds Better Content

In the following series of blog posts, we’re going to look at where Big Data comes from—and where it goes. We’ll examine how Big Data is used by content marketers to refine and target content. And we’ll explain why although Big Data is new and dependent on the latest technology and the smartest number crunchers, it actually allows big companies, like those in finance, insurance and healthcare, to deliver services as personalized as those once offered by mom and pop stores.

The collection and analysis of Big Data is now essential . It lets content marketers build personas that better reflect the desires and preferences of customers. It enables us to build customer journeys that are accurate—and to produce effective strategies to raise specific low points. It can even allow marketers to identify patterns and predict customer behavior, intervening before a problem arises and stopping a customer from leaving before they become dissatisfied.

Big Data is about numbers, but the numbers themselves are just figures on a screen. What really makes the difference is the content the Big Data produces and the speed with which it brings customers to the finish line.

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