Over the past few years, the term Big Data has gone from being a hot buzz word in the technology industry to a highly overused and irrelevant bit of parlance. Unfortunately, this warped perception is a result of the superfluous marketing hype surrounding it, which has failed to clarify the role of big data and its appropriate application in a business organization.
Big data is the collective plethora of structured and unstructured data created by an organization, which is then accordingly dissected in an effort to determine how it can add further value to the business. There are 3 key factors which must be considered while evaluating big data – the volume, variety and velocity of information.
The real value of big data lies in your ability to zero in on the right information that will give you essential consumer insights regarding your products. This will allow you to optimize your organization’s business strategies in order to target consumer needs more accurately.
1. Understanding What Drives the Customer Life Cycle
While most organizations prefer to stay in their comfort zone by recycling the same product marketing model with little strategic evolution considered as their user base expands, the fact is that these companies lose out on revenue expanding opportunities due to their inadequate assessments of the customer life cycle.
A standard customer life cycle has 4 major dimensions that must be masterfully exploited in order to make your product truly successful:
- Capturing the attention of new consumers.
- Encouraging the customer to explore your product.
- Preserving and increasing their interest.
- Acquiring new customers and giving more up-selling and cross-selling incentives to your existing customers.
Big data based on your customer life cycle will help you gain vital insights into their mindset and their motivations. This data will eventually become the fuel that drives all your future marketing campaigns and other business strategies. Being able to harness the power of your organization’s multi-channel marketing and identifying the perfect combination of inbound and outbound channels to extract more relevant big data, which will help pin down a more complete profile of your customers.
2. Harnessing Customer Intelligence
Every campaign your company runs generates a ton of customer interaction data that can easily be considered consumer intelligence. Customer intelligence is a portal of awareness through which you can gain insight into the popularity of your campaign at each consumer life cycle stage, assess the total response generated, and see which channels were the most effective.
This data helps you to profile and segment your customers and offer more personalized solutions to cater to their needs.
3. Fuelling your Big Data Engine the Right Way
The customer life cycle is what truly powers every big data engine and understanding how to leverage it to your benefit is what helps you maintain perfect synergy between the interests of your organization and your customers. It is quintessential to pay equal attention to the retention of your existing customers and add more value to their experience along with devising strategies to gain new ones.
