Guest post by Andrew Lisa:
How Is Big Data Changing the Marketing and Sales Worlds?
It’s no longer just major enterprises that are awash in mountains of unmanageable data. New technologies and the mobilization of computing have forced even modestly sized businesses to warehouse enormous amounts of information regarding the needs, habits and behaviors of customers. As the quantity of data grows – and the manner in which that data is analyzed and presented changes – marketing and sales techniques must change as well.
Big data can provide the seeds necessary to grow your marketing and sales operations.
Understanding Marketing, Sales and Big Data
Big data is a loosely defined concept that involves groups – or sets – of data that are dealt with individually because their entirety would be too difficult to process as a whole. Finding the bridge between IT and marketing is a concept that is constantly evolving. Most marketing and sales applications related to big data involve establishing that bridge – using data analytics to get a complete picture of customer habits and business trends.
Analytics
According to recent research, companies that effectively use big data analytics achieve productivity and profitability up to 6 percent higher than those that don’t. Companies that put data at the center of their marketing and sales initiatives improve their marketing return on investment by up to 20 percent.
Marketing and Sales Presentations
As discussed in “Visualization for Big Data,” the big data revolution is dramatically impacting the way sales and marketing professionals present their data. The analysis of big data – combined with the increased expectations of viewers who are used to visually stimulating Web content – has led to sales and marketing presentations that are not just visual, but interactive. Unlike the text- and bar graph-laden presentations that came before, in the age of big data, presentations are designed to show, not tell.
Even smaller companies have to handle massive amounts of data.
From presentation to analytics to sales techniques, big data presents challenges, but for savvy businesses, it opens doors, as well. Big data analytics can identify opportunities and – through analysis of the needs and habits of customers – can even improve upon visual appeal of presentations. Likewise, job seekers posting content will do well to analyze which are being received best in order to continue the same in order to boost their carreer.
Andrew Lisa is a freelance business writer. He covers small business management and business software.
