Studies reveal that many of the marketing organizations are focusing greatly on big data marketing initiatives in 2014. They are planning to invest more on technology than talent, which could be a costly mistake.
According to a survey conducted among 400 marketers at the DMA (Direct Marketing Association) 13 annual conference, 60 percent of companies expect their big data marketing budgets to increase this year. Another 54% of the marketers have already invested on big data. Majority of the marketers are not planning to add new employees, in contradiction to the results of last year, when they expected to hire more employees for big data positions.
The survey report also claims that many marketers are moving from the information-gathering stage to the analytics phase of big data adoption. Around 73 percent of marketers are of the opinion that data analysis will be more of a priority this year, and they are planning to hire more data analysts or strategists. More than half of the early adopters say that they have surpassed the challenges associated with the initial stage process such as data collection and data cleansing, and so they are more towards the analytics/mining part.
Tips for Successful Data-driven Marketing
Four steps to stay in line with data driven marketing are:
- Adoption of big data into the process cannot be achieved in a single day, as it requires several years of planning and patience. It can act as a means for building customer relationship, increasing retention and loyalty and optimizing marketing performance over time.
- The initial returns from big data marketing may be small. Using those early returns to continue building marketing strategies is often preferred in the difficult phase in the deployment of data mining and analytics.
- Even though technology plays a great role in collecting and analyzing big data, it cannot replace human intervention completely. Not hiring the right staff or failure to associate with the right data mining company can make the data implementation plan to fail.
- Since the processing of big data cannot be done in a day, start from small and be systematic and steady in its implementation.
The data mining process cannot completely avoid human intervention. Technology and talent should go in hand to hand to make big data marketing a grand success.
