Think back to your favorite fourth grade memory. Was it playing pee-wee football? Having your first ‘girlfriend’? Going to an overnight camp? All fond recollections but for me it was the annual science fair. Yes, I admit it. I was the kid who got uber excited about scheming the perfect science experiment to showcase at my school…and if successful, take all the way to the county fair.
Although I would love to say my “Which Laundry Detergent REALLY Works the Best?” experiment led me on a path of groundbreaking discoveries, I reluctantly decided to walk away from my love for science. Lucky for me, my past love for science and my current passion for marketing are colliding.
Now I know the idea of combining science and marketing can sound like oil and water to some marketers but ‘Big Data Marketing’ is proving to be a major game changer for how brands engage with their customers.
Let’s start with the birds’ eye view. Big data marketing allows a company to use all of the data they have about their customers to then influence specific behaviors – behaviors that align with some key objective such as driving purchases, increasing satisfaction, or building brand loyalty. Key to all of this is the ability to classify customers according to how they actually behave and then act in the right context based on the real time behavioral profile of an individual. The result – companies engage with customers when it matters most i.e., when they have the greatest chance of influencing behavior to drive a desired action.
Similar to that fourth grade experiment, this marketing technique leverages analytics – and in this case heavy duty analytics – with technology that automatically identifies patterns and changes in customer behaviors e.g., how customers engage with your brand and how often, what influences certain behaviors, which offers work best and in what contexts, how likely customers are to repeat past behaviors, how likely a customer’s friends are to behave in similar ways, etc. It goes beyond grouping customers into segments to looking at customers as individuals. And just as important, it allows marketers to act more intelligently based on having a longitudinal view of a customer versus a mere snapshot in time.
In order to know how to influence desired behavior you have to know how customers actually behave. What big data marketing does is leverage continual behavioral patterns and multiple layers of context to determine – in an automated fashion – how and when it’s best to engage with a customer. So a customer visits your website using their mobile device during lunch. But you know that their preference is to make purchases from their PC while at home during the evening. Shouldn’t this latter piece of data influence how you engage them?
Understanding customer behavior over time is key. In high school I was on the track team. My coach could have said (but never did), “Glenn, I’d like you to run the mile.” I had the same build and size as another guy on the team. A guy that ultimately won at State. So why did he not push me to run the mile? Because I was terrible at it. Over weeks and weeks of observation, under varying conditions (contexts), my coach realized there was no way this kid was ever going to get to a sub 5:30 mile - so he didn’t even try. He saved himself and, fortunately, me a lot of pain. I actually became a sprinter and long jumper.
Most marketers only use static profiles - let’s call it “little data” - to determine how to market to customers. And unlike my high school track coach, get painful results.
Going back to my laundry science experiment, I remember checking to see (and documenting) twice per day which detergents were having the greatest impact on my ketchup, grass and red wine stains. If I missed one evaluation time, my experiment would be faulty.
Unfortunately, monitoring the behaviors and results of hundreds or thousands of mobile users is not quite as simple as checking in on five white t-shirts twice per day. And with mobile data usage growing by the minute, it’s not going to get any easier.
The reality is most tools being used by marketers today were not built with mobile or big data marketing in mind. They can’t handle the gathering, analyzing, or monitoring of such voluminous amounts of data. They don’t have the degree of automation necessary to automatically and without intervention identify and act upon changes in customer behavior. And they don’t have a closed feedback loop which allows a marketer to iterate and rapidly optimize based on real-world learning.
The beauty of true big data marketing technology is its ability to produce rich insights as to what is working and what is not – so that you can rapidly optimize your results. If you’re able to quickly determine that certain offers delivered in certain contexts perform better – that is, positively influence the desired behavior – than other pairings that may actually have a negative effect on the desired action, then you can continuously optimize your marketing efforts.
For those of us in the world of marketing, the words ‘data’ and ‘analytics’ can suggest a manual process of trying to determine ‘what will work best’ but it’s time to move to the new generation of marketing. Big data marketing offers a deep understanding of how customers are behaving and allows brands to act on that understanding when it matters most – to drive dramatically better results. Customers receive more relevant communications and companies are able to influence specific behaviors that positively impact revenues and retention.
This intersection of big data and marketing – what some are calling “scientific marketing” – is exactly what brands need to help maximize customer value. There is no doubt that digital channels offer marketers new ways to engage with customers, but the ability to turn big data into actionable behavioral insight to then engage with customers in a personal, more relevant way is a lynchpin to success.
Oh, and for those of you who are wondering, Tide was the clear winner.