Data is everywhere. More than the presence of data and the amount of data, it is essential to know how it can be acquired and analyzed for your business. Big data refers to large volumes of data. This can be both structured and unstructured data. Big data is data that is huge in size and grows exponentially with time. As the data is too large and complex, traditional data management tools are not sufficient for storing or processing it efficiently. But analyzing big data is crucial to know the patterns and trends to be adopted to improve your business.
What is Data Science?
Data science refers to a blend of various algorithms, tools, and machine learning principles that operate with the goal of discovering hidden patterns from raw data. It is used to make decisions and predictions by using prescriptive analysis, predictive causal analysis, and machine learning. It is used to scope out the right questions from the dataset. It is a multidisciplinary field that works at the raw level of data (structured, unstructured, or both) to make predictions, identify patterns and trends, build data models, and create more efficient machine learning algorithms. A data science expert works in the realm of the unknown. Some of the data science techniques are regression analysis, classification analysis, clustering analysis, association analysis, and anomaly detection.
The major difference between big data and data science is that big data deal with huge volumes of data that cannot be handled using traditional database programming. Data science deals with data-focused scientific activity. Data science includes the approaches used to process big data and harnesses the potential of big data to make business decisions. Data science can be regarded as a subset of big data.
Having gained a fair idea about big data and data science, let us now move on to understand how data science can help grow marketing ROI (Return on Investment).
1. Enhanced User Experience
Setting up customized marketing campaigns will not succeed if your landing page provides a poor user experience. A landing page or destination page is the page on which your visitors land when they first reach the website. It is deliberately created to help marketers convert visitors into leads. It can also be defined as a standalone web page that has been specifically created for an advertising or marketing campaign. It really hurts when paid visitors visit your website but leave without subscribing or buying. A similar situation was faced by Fairmont Hotels and Resorts. Though they were driving traffic to their website, their visitors were leaving without going to the booking page. They then used data from multiple sources to understand the travel history, visitor habits, average income, etc. This way, they could optimize their website and bring about better conversions. A better website experience helped increase bookings. Thus, a user-friendly landing page helps boost conversions and supercharges your marketing campaigns. This will, in turn, help grow marketing ROI.
2. Analysis-based Marketing Decisions
Using data science for marketing helps make the right choices at the right time. Decision-making forms the crux of marketing ROI. The best decision to take is to let the data drive you. This type of decision-making will be:
- Timely
- Accurate
- Real-time
- Well-managed
- Proactive
- Result-oriented
US Xpress, a leading transportation solutions provider, collects data from several elements such as truck engine operation, GPS, fuel consumption, etc. and uses this data to boost productivity and optimize fleet management, This way, it saves millions in operating costs every year. Powering data science with marketing decision-making will provide positive results.
3. Customized Marketing Campaigns
A major reason for the failure of marketing campaigns is because the message isn’t relevant. If a marketing campaign is not personalized, it will most likely fail. For example, showing diaper ads to singles is not going to work, and if you send an email campaign to purchase a new product to the people who have already purchased the product, that will also be a failure.
Data science and big data help create specific marketing campaigns with personalized ad copy, and landing pages and offers on the appropriate channels. There have been many companies in the past that have monitored how rental volume and demand shifted every week. Data science helps analyze trends for several weeks before coming to a conclusion. Collecting data from all channels and personalizing marketing messages are good techniques to boost marketing ROI.
4. Understanding Target Audience
Big data and data science analysis helps digital marketers gain a better understanding of their target audience. This helps create ideal customer profiles and better buyer personas. Online, offline, and mobile sources can be used to combine and merge audience data. This makes marketing campaigns easier and helps create highly targeted content. Netflix is a perfect example when it comes to using data from millions of its global users to analyze viewing habits and behaviours across cities, states, countries, and continents. Using this information, Netflix buys new programs that will attract more of its customers. Understanding the needs, interests, behaviours, and reactions of your customers will help in hooking them on to your business.
Conclusion
Data science is an exceptional tool for marketers who have learned how to use it. Marketing decision-making of any business must be powered by data science to help make sense of the data. This can be done by using the appropriate analytic tools and the right datasets. Finally, it all boils down to how and what data is used by companies to fuel digital marketing.
To become a data science expert and learn more about big data certifications, check out Global Tech Council.