What 's Big Data

Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data–so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This data comes from everywhere: from sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos posted online, transaction records of online purchases, and from mobile phone GPS signals to name a few. This data is big data.

Big data spans three dimensions: Variety, Velocity and Volume.

·         Variety – Big data extends beyond structured data, including unstructured data of all varieties: text, audio, video, click streams, log files and more.

·         Velocity – Often time-sensitive, big data must be used as it is streaming in to the enterprise in order to maximize its value to the business.

·         Volume – Big data comes in one size: large. Enterprises are awash with data, easily amassing terabytes and even petabytes of information.

Big data is more than a challenge; it is an opportunity to find insight in new and emerging types of data, to make your business more agile, and to answer questions that, in the past, were beyond reach. Until now, there was no practical way to harvest this opportunity. Today, the big data opens the door to a world of possibilities, giving organizations a solution that is designed specifically with the needs of the enterprise in mind:

In a context, what are the most powerful ways marketers will be using big data?

1.     Attribution - understanding which channels, content, and messaging is working best.

2.     Personalisation and engagement scoring - delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.

3.     Sales efficiency and effectiveness - giving the sales department more relevant information at the right time, helping to close more business faster.

4.     closing the loop - from marketing lead to sale and ultimately maximizing true ROI.

Typically in a high-consideration (B2B), multi-touch sales process, most marketers are only tracking web activity to lead. This only tells a part of the story. In reality, marketing campaigns are still interacting with people into the late stages of the buying process. Connect your data from lead to sale; and directly tie marketing activity to revenue and you get the full picture.

As digital marketing techniques and technologies have evolved, front-end metrics from web analytics tools often fall short in delivering enough high-value insight to drive business decisions. Deriving high-value business insights from disconnected datasets and offline sales processes often requires time-consuming, complex, and expensive software implementations. It doesn't have to be long, complicated, or expensive, but you do need help - either internally uniting from IT and database experts, or outside help from specialists with experience doing just this.

1.     What opportunities exist to boost sales conversions vs. just increasing traffic or lead conversions?

2.     How do content, channels, and user experience affect lead quality and conversion-to-sale?

3.     How do buyers behave differently from non-buyers across campaigns, channels, and your website?

4.     Where should I invest my marketing and media dollars to produce the largest ROI, not just more traffic or conversions?

Implementation

1.     Write JavaScript code to set a cookie from your website and pass it as a custom variable to your analytics platform, in this case Google Analytics. This ensures the unique customer key will be generated on the customer's first visit, and then passed with every click, event, and goal completion that Google Analytics captures. It also ensures that the customer key will be consistently retained in the user's browser across sessions.

2.     Pass the customer key to the client's lead management system. Most have web service API for lead form submissions.

3.     Modify your reports and data extracts to automatically load a SQL database with web analytics and lead data. Since leads are eventually converted to sales in the lead management system, you now had all the data needed to perform a closed-loop analysis.

4.     Push some of the key findings from this data into your real-time dashboard system. This unlocks key sales and marketing data from complex and hard-to-read spreadsheets and made it easy to view by anyone, anytime. By delivering this data passively, we were able to focus on our next and most important step, mining the data for insights.

This solution had low implementation costs and low complexity. No expensive servers or configurations were needed and no modifications to infrastructure necessary.