What are the benefits of big data in marketing and SEO? Learn and find effective tactics for implementing data analysis in your strategy!
Big Data Marketing: Trends and Best Practices
Big data allows better customer understanding and personalization. It streamlines analytics and helps businesses achieve their goals faster. All in all, collecting, measuring, and acting on big data is a way to outdo the competition and secure growth. And it holds special value in marketing and search engine optimization.
Being among the most prominent marketing trends of the past years, big data can have multiple benefits and applications. If you are not using it yet, continue reading, and we will tell you about the perks and best practices to set up for success!
Understanding Big Data in Marketing
Big data are sets of structured and unstructured information so large that they can’t be handled manually. Such sets of information are dealt with computationally instead. The purpose is to acquire valuable insights, detect patterns, and foresee trends.
To help you grasp the idea better, experts outline three primary characteristics that define this kind of information:
- Large volume (often accompanied by low density and a lack of structure);
- Extremely high-velocity rate of receiving and acting on information;
- Broad variety of information types (e.g., text, video, audio, etc.).
The Benefits of Big Data
Both SEOs and marketers are already using big data to their benefit. Namely, in search engine optimization, it’s used to analyze performance, detect areas for improvement, and outshine the competition. It can help you understand the preferences and behaviors of your target audience better, hence, gaining invaluable insights into what they are looking for on the web.
Such data analysis principles are already integrated into many specialized SEO tools and software. Trusted tools like Google Analytics or the Ninja Reports Innovative SEO Platform collect and process huge volumes of information to help you gain valuable SEO insights.
The benefits of big data in marketing are quite extensive as well. By tapping into large amounts of varied information obtained at a high velocity (aka every day), businesses gain more freedom and accuracy in the way they handle targeting, analytics, predictive modeling, and decision-making. As a result, they can achieve the following goals:
- Improve analytics and prediction for more strategic decision-making;
- Boost targeting;
- Ensure personalization at scale;
- Optimize advertising expenses;
- Deliver greater customer experience;
- Minimize customer churn;
- Foresee future marketing trends to stay ahead of the curve;
- And eventually gain a competitive advantage.
Best Practices for Utilizing Big Data in Marketing
So, how do marketers use data to develop promotional strategies? The following best practices can come in handy:
Data Collection and Management
Invest in advanced and trusted third-party tools meant for web scraping and data consolidation. These tools should help you collect valuable insights in real-time and organize them efficiently.
The website scraper tool will use bots to visit your site’s URLs and examine the HTML code of every page. More advanced bots may be equipped with algorithms for browsing individual pages and clicking on links to collect as much data from as many pages as possible. After crawling your pages these tools will extract the needed kind of data and organize it in a database or spreadsheet.
There are multiple ways to use this opportunity to your benefit. Namely, you can use web scraping for the following purposes:
- Receive data-driven insights to make better strategic decisions;
- Identify emerging trends and forecast future trends to stay competitive;
- Harvest information from competitors and evaluate them;
- Collect leads’ information faster and easier.
Data Privacy and Security
Apart from opting for high-quality tools, implement your own information governance policies and practices that will help you ensure its security and reliability. Regularly audit information sources and test the quality of insights you obtain from them before making big decisions.
Analyzing and Interpreting Data
When interpreting your insights, always remember that they don’t exist in a vacuum. That is, there is always some context behind it, such as the processes, circumstances, and conditions in which the information was collected. Ensure a thorough understanding of these contexts to interpret your insights accurately.
To make the analysis more straightforward, feel free to use visual aids, such as dashboards, graphs, and charts. Information visualization can help you identify important patterns and ideas at a glance.
Implementing Data-Driven Marketing Strategies
After analyzing your marketing data, seek ways to use it in your strategy. For example, use statistical insights to determine the best channels or times to engage with your audience. Leverage the information about similar customer demographics, psychographics, or behaviour patterns to create and fine-tune your buyer personas. Use predictive analytics to foresee the major content marketing trends that might resonate with your audience. And so on.
A good example of big data marketing is how financial sector establishments create rich profiles of their individual customers that include information about their preferences, goals, and lifestyles. This information is then used for highly personalized, micro-targeted advertising.
Measuring and Evaluating Success
After implementing big data marketing, focus on measuring the outcomes of your new approach. Define the key performance indicators and metrics that align with your company’s objectives and keep an eye on them to assess the outcomes and refine your strategy for the best results.
Incorporating Big Data into SEO Strategies
As you already know, big data can also offer significant perks in terms of analytics for SEO. Here are a few of the best ways to use it to enhance your SEO efforts:
Enhancing Keyword Research
Big data analysis can guide keyword research in multiple ways. It helps SEOs understand user search behaviour better and thus, gain valuable insights into trending keywords and related search queries, and predict future keyword trends. Also, it can help you measure a wealth of different performance characteristics, such as search volume and competition, to prioritize your keywords.
Leverage tools that offer you comprehensive, analysis-based insights into keywords to target the right queries that take you higher in SERPs and drive more qualified traffic to your site.
Content Optimization
Big data can help you multiply your SEO ROI by offering an informed approach to content creation and optimization. First of all, by consolidating and interpreting large volumes of insights related to your target audience’s behaviour, interests, and preferences, you can understand what kind of content they are looking for right now, as well as predict future content marketing trends.
By leveraging tools that help you dig into your audience’s needs, you can form a content strategy that really resonates. And with the deep insights from your keyword research, you can optimize your content to rank higher in search results.
Last but not least, analytical tools can help you keep an eye on the most important content performance metrics, such as traffic, time on page, click-through rates, and bounce rates to pinpoint which content pieces perform well and identify areas for improvement.
Technical SEO Improvements
Lastly, by collecting and analyzing large sets of information, businesses can also enhance their technical SEO and thus, deliver better user experiences and also improve their positions in SERPs.
There are a variety of technical SEO solutions, such as Google PageSpeed Insights, that can help you tap into different aspects of your site’s technical performance, including its speed, usability, functionality, accessibility, and much more. By measuring these performance aspects and fine-tuning them, you can greatly improve your SEO game and make your visitors stay happy and loyal.
Big Data Marketing: Top Challenges and Considerations
While it can be incredibly beneficial, there are a number of marketing challenges when it comes to handling big data:
- Data integration – Collecting large volumes of information from various sources can be incredibly time-consuming, and organizing them into a coherent format is also complex. To solve the problem, you can leverage specialized tools (including CRMs, SEO data analysis tools, ad management software, etc.) and integrate them with each other to have all important information at hand in one place.
- Security, privacy, and regulations compliance – Governing large flows of information might cause significant threats to security and privacy. The solution is to select reliable big data tools that take solid care of safety, letting you focus on things that matter for your business.
- Quality—The only way to gain maximum benefit from your marketing data is to ensure that it’s quality, accurate, and reliable. Two important steps to ensuring this are to rely on reputable and trusted tools that guarantee high accuracy and test your data pipelines rigorously to ensure that there are no errors.
- Lack of expertise – Getting used to data-driven advertising and the new tools needed to implement it can be rather challenging for less tech-savvy specialists. This can cause some friction and ineffectiveness of the workflow. Overcoming the learning curve is possible through quality onboarding and training that can help your team adapt to the changes.
Future of Big Data in Marketing
Though it’s still being adopted and is associated with a number of challenges, it’s pretty clear that big data is the future of marketing. As consumers prefer more and more personalized promotion, the value of an informed approach to SEO and promotion strategies is growing bigger.
But what exactly should we expect in the future? Currently, experts outline the two primary big data marketing trends to look out for:
- Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) – It’s predicted that AI and ML will enable greater automatization of big data analysis to help businesses make decisions faster and at scale.
- Real-time analysis – Real-time advertising is already a thing. It enables businesses to make informed decisions and adjust to emerging trends quickly, getting ahead of the competition. In the future, we believe that real-time analysis will become even more effective and accessible.
Conclusion
As you now know, making well-informed decisions must be one of the most important elements of successful marketing and SEO. In a world where over 80% of consumers want to choose companies that know their needs and deliver personalized experiences, big data is your golden ticket to meeting these needs and growing your business.
Luckily, after reading this article, you should have better knowledge and practical tips for implementing informed promotion strategies yourself. Start using this knowledge now to outshine the competition tomorrow!
