Data Driven Business in 2016

2016 will see improvements and growth in the ways that businesses use marketing and consumer data that is readily available to every online business owner.

Businesses that use data will find more tools, more data and more areas that will support their sales driven focus.

For those businesses that are still figuring out when and how to implement data driven business processes, newer techniques will assist them with moving from novice to implementer.

In this article we discuss 5 technologies that will change the way that businesses use data in 2016.

Data Driven Marketing and Advertising

The primary motivator pushing data driven business efforts will come from business efforts targeted at promoting their products and services.

The results of a December 2015 study performed by Winterberry Group and Global Data Marketing and Advertising (GDMA) found that more than 81 percent of surveyed businesses report that data is important to their marketing campaigns. More than ½ of all the survey participants responded that their customer engagement strategies dependence on data was “critical.”

Today’s business interactions with their customers are highly dependent upon demographic, purchasing, spending and other types of consumer interest and targeting data.

The data driven focus of online businesses are key drivers pushing data storage, analytics and marketing platforms into marketing department use as part of their data driven marketing and analysis processes.

Big Data

The datasets used by today’s data driven businesses are huge. In fact the complexity and massive size of the databases alone require special tools with capabilities that were unforeseeable over a decade ago.

Big Data is the term used to describe these datasets. Analytics tools such as Hadoop have allowed companies such as Hewlett Packard and Facebook to improve the customer service experiences of their users, decrease business expenses, and to manage data and use scenarios of their customers.

Big Data enhances a business’ ability to make sense of what would otherwise be unmanageable data and relationships.

Internet of Things

With greater frequency, devices and sensors are being utilized to collect and store data from numerous sources ranging from automobile and pedestrian traffic, weather and drought data, health and other types of processes which generate, or can be mapped into, signals that can be tallied and measured by these devices. Even the old barcode scanning system has made technological improvements.

The Internet of Things describes this widespread implementation of this type of measurement and storage as it is captured, stored and manipulated in the Internet cloud.

Nearly 6.5 billion such devices are estimated to be connected to the Internet by 2016.

Internet of Things will have a massive impact on data driven business processes.

Customer Targeting

Online customer purchasing generates huge volumes of data which businesses have begun to prioritize the exploration of.

Computer software intelligence, in the form of machine learning algorithms, allow businesses to view customer interactions with business websites and products, and their own devices in ways previously not possible.

Marketers of data driven businesses have steadily increased their demands on algorithmic tools which allow them to better understand their customers.

Customers can be better targeted with special offers and new products, after the voluminous amounts of their purchasing data is analyzed.

Real Time Analytics

While the above data driven business processes are critical for businesses in terms of better running their marketing campaigns, a problem encountered has been the lag of when the data is available to when it is processed and able to be acted upon.

The shift to and promise of real time analytics is driven by the new capabilities of being able to respond to new data immediately. Real time analytics introduces the ability for companies to make instantaneous smart adjustments to what their customers are offered, how it is priced and up-selling their customers products and services meaningfully tailored to their individual habits and interests.

Conclusion

The shift from business starved to business overloaded marketing data creates opportunities for companies to take another look at their data driven processes and explore new tools, technologies and paradigms.

Businesses that implement new data processes should expect to see increased bottom lines and customer satisfaction.