Big Data is big in the news; it’s big on the minds of CEOs; and in some industries it’s made a big impact on cost savings and operational inefficiencies.
But for B2B marketing and sales teams, is Big Data really that much more than a galvanizing term that’s sparked widespread interest and attention? Some research suggests that the excitement around Big Data’s impact on marketing doesn’t translate to real results.
Big Data Is Not a Homerun for All Marketers — Yet
For instance, eMarketer recently reported that 89% of executives said they thought Big Data would “revolutionize the way we do business.” However, a meager 5% said its primary effect was fundamentally changing the way they did business.
Additionally, marketers in the LinkedIn forum “Content Marketing Academy,” one of the largest public forums for content marketers, reveal mixed sentiment regarding Big Data’s true impact on business objectives.
On the public forum, several marketers agreed data in general is impacting decision-making, but they questioned whether the quantity of data being leveraged warrants the glitzy “Big Data” nomenclature.
The shift resulting from marketing’s use of Big Data, they say, might not be as astronomical as other applications.
Ben Rothfeld, a seasoned marketer who’s worked for Bloomberg, Axiom, and currently consults on marketing strategy for other business firms, puts it well: “If you’re thinking NASA-level computational power then, hell no,” Big Data won’t have the same impact. “However, if you’re talking about the techniques developed to handle large data set, then hell YES.”
Indeed, if you turn to actual NASA-level applications, you see those industries interpret the term in a slightly different way.
The Square Kilometre Array, a telescope with millions of antennas and expected to be operational by 2024, will leverage Big Data computation capabilities to gather 14 exabytes of information per day.
An exabyte is equivalent to 10^18, or 1 billion gigabytes.
To give you a context, in 1993 the entire world’s information exchange capacity couldn’t even reach one exabyte. Our capacity to compute, exchange, and store information has risen exponentially from 281 petabytes in 1986, 471 petabytes in 1993, 2.2 exabytes in 2000, 65 exabytes in 2007, and it was predicted that the amount of traffic flowing over the Internet reached 667 exabytes this year.
Are marketer’s using, leveraging, or accessing exabytes—even today?
Probably not.
…But We’re Making Strides
We are, however, increasingly tracking the effectiveness of campaigns, by gathering all the appropriate quantitative statistics: unique visitors, A/B testing of email campaigns, appropriation of content marketing to relevant sales cycles, and even content scoring. This access and archiving of data is providing important business intelligence that is, in fact, helping marketing leaders make decisions, detect trends, and measure results.
Frederick Barber, Chief Analytic Officer at Meredith XCelerated Marketing, is one example of a marketer who really has a grasp on how data can inform processes.
With a deep background in analytics and demographics, Barber has learned which statistics matter for the stereotypically vague marketing-scape, and has created several successful businesses around that particular topic.
“Our agency has had terrific results leveraging machine learning technology in a Big Data environment to deliver content recommendations,” Barber said. “The use case is where you observe email and website clicks, pull that history together in an analytic environment, and then analyze the correlations in types/categories of content engaged with to recommend the ‘next best’ item.”
Predictive insight is one of the most important qualities of Big Data, and is altering the way marketers do their jobs. It has the power to make teams more effective, produce more results with fewer assets, and reduce the amount of “luck” traditionally associated with vague marketing strategies.
Keep Chipping Away
Though Big Data hasn’t, arguably, created a tsunami of change in B2B marketing, it has sent ripples through the industry. What’s more? We expect that the mere 5% of marketers who’ve reported seeing actual impacts from Big Data will steadily rise, alongside increased understanding of the topic.
Until then, perhaps educate yourself a bit and read about How to Pull Big Data into your Marketing Strategy.
About the Author
Jean Spencer is a content marketing manager at Kapost. She loves data, numbers, analytics, and writing about how those numbers can make an impact on marketing. Follow her @Jeanwrites.
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