How Big Data Analytics Will Determine Future of Marketing and Sales: A McKinsey Report

In this era of Big Data where competition is fueled by your ability to harness the power of data in order to make it work for your business growth, the need of the hour for every brand and business organization is Analytics. In fact, a McKinsey report in the Forbes says that Big Data Analytics will determine how sales and marketing are conducted in the future.

One of the most important facets that the report highlighted was that gathering customer insights and converting that into critical business intelligence is inevitable for modern businesses. The report says, “The explosion in data and digital technologies has opened up an unprecedented array of insights into customer needs and behaviors”.

Thus, while businesses understand the importance of Big Data and Analytics, they are also making the smart move towards adopting Social Media Analytics tools for helping them make sense of their Big Data. According to the report, “Those (businesses) that use Big Data and analytics effectively show productivity rates and profitability that are 5-6 percent higher than those of their peers.” 

In other words, the report by McKinsey defines the success of organizations using Big Data to their wisdom to use analytics effectively. It says that such organizations are successful because they use analytics for the following:

  

a)      Identifying and pinpointing specifically the immense business building opportunities existing in the micromarkets.

b)      Understanding consumer decision journey and finding out what factors lead the consumer from starting with merely showing interest in ending up buying the product. Analytics are also used to spot reasons for and solve customer attrition. 
c)       Using analytics to create detailed customer profiles that include their specific likes, needs, wants and affiliations and use it to aim customers with perfectly targeted and often personalized marketing campaigns plays a crucial role in business success (increase sales by 10% and marketing ROI by 5-10 times). 

With regard to how competent must modern analytic tools be to successfully tackle the challenges of expanding data streams, McKinsey noted that that natural language processing, predictive and sentiment analytics (to decipher customer behavior) and “algorithmic marketing” will be the key components to look for in advanced analytics solutions.

We at Shout Analytics, take pride in the fact that our social media analytics solution fits the McKinsey description totally

To know more about our analytics capabilities or to find out Shout Analytics can help you in your Big Data analysis needs, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com

Want Inexpensive, Effective Market Research? Check Your Competitors’ Data

An extensive and detailed Market research is always useful. But then, not all can afford the cost and time involved in it. However, there is an easy way out – closely study what your competitors are doing to be in the game and gather all the input about your market. 

Studying your competitors’ activities and analysing their strategies will give you a holistic idea about your market. This method is an inexpensive but very effective way to glean insights on the existing trends and requirements of your niche area. Through this, you will learn about -

1) Mark Demographics: 

A demographic study is long and laborious. Instead, examine your competitors’ target market to identify the people (your potential customers) who make up your market. This will give you a head start to understand everything about your to-be customers including their likes and dislikes on an age group, gender, profession and locality basis.

2) Discover New Customers:

Studying what your competitors are offering to the already existing customers will tell you what you should be doing to convert them into your customers. If you find areas or aspects overlooked by your competitors, then turn them into your strong holds. If you find gaps in their services, tailor your products to plug those gaps. 

3) List Best Mediums for Marketing:

When market research firms, media experts and lengthy media positioning surveys are out of bounds, you can still get accurate and just the right information regarding marketing and promotion when you study the channels or mediums used by your competitors to promote and market their service. This way you too would know which ones are effective for you. Create your presence on those channels that generate maximum engagement and frame your strategy to tackle low engagement channels. 

4) Find the Best Influencers:

As with all the above steps, finding key influencers in your industry is no easy task. Hence, the best option here too, is to assess your competitors’ audiences and finding out which few among them are highly influential within their circles, most active on social channels and largely connected to their and other similar communities. Ear marking the influencers will allow you to tailor your shareable content exclusively for them and their larger network.