At first glance, marketing and big data might seem like an odd pair, but they’re actually very complementary. Marketing is all about effectively reaching different audiences, and data tells us what’s working and what’s not.
These days, there’s more available data than most businesses and marketing teams know what to do with, which can lead to new opportunities if that data is accurately interpreted and effectively deployed.
Why is Big Data Important in Marketing?
Big data is becoming a fundamental tool in marketing. Data constantly informs marketing teams of customer behaviors and industry trends, and is used to optimize future efforts, create innovative campaigns and build lasting relationships with customers.
How Is Big Data Used in Marketing?
Big data offers a snapshot of a business’ user base, as trends, preferences and behavior patterns can be revealed through data analysis. Companies use these data insights to drive marketing strategies and product decisions.
Customer Engagement and Retention
Big data regarding customers provides marketers details about user demographics, locations, and interests, which can be used to personalize the product experience and increase customer loyalty over time.
Marketing Optimization and Performance
Big data solutions can help organize data and pinpoint which marketing campaigns, strategies or social channels are getting the most traction. This lets marketers allocate marketing resources and reduce costs for projects that aren’t yielding as much revenue or meeting desired audience goals.
Competitor Tracking and Operation Adjustment
Big data can also compare prices and marketing trends among competitors to see what consumers prefer. Based on average industry standards, marketers can then adjust product prices, logistics and other operations to appeal to customers and remain competitive.
Big Data in Marketing Examples
The following companies offer unified views of data, entire customer databases, campaign optimization, strategy services and other crucial data services to make marketing as effective as possible.
Focus: Customer engagement
How it’s using big data: Attain offers marketers a software platform that harnesses commerce data to provide real-time insights for targeted ad campaigns. Additionally, the company operates Klover and Frisbee, mobile apps that provide consumers with financial tools and rewards in exchange for permission to use their data for strategic research. Through this exchange, Attain empowers businesses to make data-driven decisions while offering users valuable financial services and rewards.
Focus: Enterprise analytics
How it’s using big data: Applecart equips C-suite executives with data analytics solutions that help them understand their businesses’ audiences and improve their marketing strategies. It uses data to help companies optimize targeting and engagement in multiple campaigns. Applecart’s solutions have uses in areas spanning investor relations and employee relations as well.
Focus: Customer engagement
How it’s using big data in marketing: INFUSEmedia creates demand generation solutions that include brand activation, intent-driven marketing, content marketing and lead-flow dashboards. The proprietary platform pulls from a worldwide database of over 15 million companies across more than 28 verticals (including technology, media, real estate, healthcare and consumer goods) to help B2B companies target audiences and drive interest.
Focus: Customer engagement
How it’s using big data in marketing: Catalina combines an enormous database of shopper purchase history and a personalized advertising experience to ensure that retailers, CPG brands and agencies market to their audiences as effectively as possible. Catalina helps companies leverage data from millions of shoppers to drive personal messages based on current, past and future buying habits, resulting in more repeat trips from shoppers.
Focus: Customer engagement
How it’s using big data in marketing: Ogury’s advertising engine delivers comprehensive audience interests, brand performance, privacy protection and sustainability within one technology stack, built and optimized for mobile technology. Advertisers working with Ogury benefit from fully visible impactful ads, future-proof targeting and unwavering protection. Publishers enjoy the rewards of a respectful user experience, incremental revenues and premium demand with Ogury’s solutions.
Focus: Marketing optimization
How it’s using big data: System1 operates a marketing technology platform specializing in consumer acquisition across multiple channels and verticals. Its responsive acquisition marketing platform leverages data science, AI and machine learning to match consumer demand with the most suitable verticals for conversion. System1’s platform integrates with major digital ad networks, using proprietary algorithms to deliver scalable success for its customers.
Focus: Marketing optimization
How it’s using big data in marketing: The Knotch platform is designed to help brands optimize digital content strategy by measuring analytics, user feedback and audience data while tracking competitor content for the purposes of comparison and website performance assessment.
Focus: Marketing optimization
How it’s using big data in marketing: Gravy Analytics uses location intelligence to give marketers more insight into where consumers go and what their interests are. Its Audiences product offers access to pseudonymous U.S. mobile user data, all to help brands in industries like hospitality, retail, finance and restaurants learn more about what current and potential customers want.
Focus: Marketing optimization
How it’s using big data in marketing: Howl is a creator platform for the customer-centric and product-obsessed. Creators of every size use Howl’s commerce and payments technology to get better rates and easy payments for their big ideas. Creators on Howl earn more when they open doors for others, and have the tools to turn their craft into a business.
Focus: Marketing optimization
How it’s using big data in marketing: Serving market research agencies, brands and analytics companies, DISQO provides high quality consumer data based on data points from millions of opt-in consumers so clients can map and understand their customers’ digital journeys.
Focus: Customer engagement
How it’s using big data in marketing: Core Digital Media utilizes predictive modeling to pinpoint hundreds of millions of daily online advertising impressions for its mortgage, home and auto brands. Of these impressions, Core determines optimal comparison-shopping paths and the expected value of these impressions for clients.
Focus: Customer acquisition and monetization
How it’s using big data: Fluent provides brands with technology to drive customer acquisition and integrate monetization opportunities throughout the user journey. Its offerings include a first-party data solution that gives brands access to opted-in consumer profiles so they can build strong relationships through personalized messaging with the goal of boosting customer loyalty and retention.
Focus: Marketing optimization
How it’s using big data in marketing: Wiland blends data, business intelligence and marketing solutions to help companies grow audiences across channels. Working with clients in numerous industries, Wiland uses proprietary consumer transaction data and predictive analytics to produce highly responsive audiences.
Focus: Marketing optimization
How it’s using big data in marketing: Supermetrics is a platform focused on helping businesses streamline their marketing data. Whether the data destination is Snowflake, BigQuery or another platform, the company’s plug-in connectors can consolidate, automate and organize data.
Focus: Marketing optimization
How it’s using big data in marketing: Infutor Data Solutions provides consumer identity management solutions to enhance customer engagement and help companies better understand customers. Infutor’s ID Max solution uses an Identity Graph to create an up-to-date customer identity profile from inbound customer data. ID Max lets marketers create personalized campaigns, increase lead attribution and maintain more touch points.
Focus: Digital Media Strategy
How it’s using big data: Accelerated Digital Media has services and strategies with a focus on programmatic ads, paid social across media and SEO marketing. It uses Google Analytics audits to ensure that its customers' data is collected and tracked correctly. The company largely works with clients in healthcare and e-commerce spaces. For example, it has worked with the teletherapy company Talkspace and children’s clothing company Monica + Andy.
Focus: Customer engagement
How it’s using big data in marketing: Centerfield develops intelligent big data-driven marketing and sales technology utilizing real time biddable media (RTB), automated call routing and customized scripting. Its proprietary platform, Dugout, combined with its sales and retention center delivers new customers at scale to many of the leading brands worldwide.
Focus: Marketing optimization
How it’s using big data in marketing: ThoughtSpot lets any employee, regardless of tech background, glean important insights from company data. The search and AI analytics platform works across industries and teams so that everyone from marketing managers to customer care representatives can pull the data they need to understand customer usage, make better marketing decisions and improve customer loyalty.
Focus: Sales optimization
How it’s using big data: Businesses use Ingage’s software tools to create interactive, informative presentations that help them close deals and build high-performing sales teams. Its technology comes with analytics features that provide data insights on sales rep and content performance to inform training and adjustments to presentations.
Focus: Advertising
How it’s using big data: RTB House aims to improve online brands through the use of AI in advertising. It has an ad-buying engine and deep learning advertising campaigns that help its client companies to drive sales, personalized retargeting and pure branding.
Focus: Sell-side advertising
How it’s using big data in marketing: Magnite is an advertising platform that helps media owners monetize their content. Brands leverage Magnite’s tech to connect with advertising agencies and display content across channels like TV, audio ads and more. As audience data becomes more accessible, media owners can leverage that information to increase the value of their audience data assets.
Focus: Customer engagement
How it’s using big data: Zeta Global is a customer lifecycle marketing company that combines real-time behavioral and demographic data with proprietary technology and analytics. Zeta Global enhances first-party data to help companies better understand their customers, enabling them to identify anonymous website visitors and enrich their profiles with unique attributes from Zeta’s database of 235 million consumer profiles.
Focus: Customer Data
How it’s using big data: AnthologyAI offers a mobile app that enables consumers to have more control over their personal data and earn money. It also provides client companies with access to an array of consumer behavioral data that is compiled with the explicit consent of users on its Knowledge Graph. The company collects more than 100 million data points every day and covers a variety of aspects to enable its client companies to gain valuable insights, all while maintaining consumer privacy.
Focus: Marketing optimization
How it’s using big data in marketing: IPONWEB designs ad exchange and digital advertising technologies. It offers businesses three solutions: BidSwitch, MediaGrid and Performance Platform, each of which is scalable and adaptable to business needs. They also assist in unlocking performance differences with other brands, optimizing bidstream performances and managing monetization and curation tools.
Focus: Customer engagement
How it’s using big data in marketing: Integral Ad Science (IAS) offers digital ad verification solutions, ensuring that ads are viewable by real people in safe and suitable environments. IAS’s mission is to be the global benchmark for trust and transparency in digital media quality for thousands of leading brands, publishers and platforms. IAS does this through data-driven technologies with actionable real-time signals and insight. IAS is part of the Vista Equity Partners portfolio of companies.
Focus: Marketing optimization
How it’s using big data in marketing: HAVI uses data to create supply chain solutions for the restaurant industry. With expertise in marketing ROI, customer and predictive analytics, HAVI helps its clients clean dissimilar and untidy data to create a single data source for use across the entire restaurant enterprise.
Focus: Marketing optimization
How it’s using big data in marketing: IgniteTech’s Beckon provides marketing analytics software to help companies and brands optimize campaigns, analyze marketing and media performance, manage marketing data and more. Serving industries like consumer electronics, finance, retail, media and travel, Beckon’s solutions ensure that the data and efforts of marketing analysts and teams are visible across channels.
Focus: Customer engagement
How it’s using big data in marketing: BlueConic’s customer data platform provides marketers with a single view of the customer. Unifying data from across channels and other sources, BlueConic gives marketer’s control over individual-level customer data. Consequently, companies can decrease bounce rates, enhance look-alike targeting and create more personal experiences for users.
Focus: Customer engagement
How it’s using big data in marketing: Ziff Davis’ Performance Marketing data insights help marketing teams enhance campaigns and develop lead generation strategies to engage audiences. The company also aims to support businesses’ process standardization, data security and regulatory compliance efforts throughout campaign lifecycles.
Focus: Customer engagement
How it’s using big data in marketing: Simon Data’s marketing solutions to help transform customer data into automated customer journeys. The platform integrates with first- and third-party data providers so marketing teams have a complete and unified view of customers in order to provide insights and meet needs.
Focus: Customer engagement
How it’s using big data: Enigma takes big data — meaning huge data sets accumulated from diverse sources —and uses AI to analyze it. Its focus is financial health and behavior in private small and medium sized businesses. The insights it gathers from this analysis are used in its sales and marketing platform, which uses dynamic data to increase spend efficiency and drive growth throughout the B2B customer lifecycle.
Focus: Marketing optimization
How it’s using big data in marketing: Analytic Partners is a marketing analytics company that assists clients in decision-making with its own data science technology, GPS Enterprise. The product has three functions: storing the data, uncovering the analytics and forecasting possible solutions. The platform also serves to answer questions like how to maximize a budget and what risks are associated with each solution.
