Marketers To Rely On Big Data To Better Understand Consumers In 2013

A recent report jointly prepared by Yesmail Interactive and Infogroup Targeting Solutions suggesting that marketers are extremely willing to find out more about their customers, but they feel there are big discrepancies between what they know and what they should and want to know about them.

The partners approached 700 marketers at the DMA2012 Annual Conference and Forrester Research eBusiness Forum to see how they plan to cope with the situation. They found that this year businesses will focus extremely on big data investments to expand their analytics and real time data expertise and adopt integrated multi-channel marketing strategies.

Nearly 70% of marketers intend to spend more on data in 2013, the poll showed, while 56% of firms will be on a recruitment drive to foster their data collection and analysis skills, with the most cited position being data analyst.

Businesses are also getting wise to the fact that in order to prepare more personalised marketing campaigns, they need to start handling customer data in a more timely manner. Over half of the marketers surveyed said that they were already using real-time data and were planning to exploit it further this year. Companies that plan to utilise real-time data for the first time or consider implementing it made up 30% of total respondents.

Among the other tools marketers plan to use this year to better understand customers is social media data, as stated by nearly 80% of marketers. Still, nearly 50% of businesses deem their websites as the best source of collecting customer data, followed by e-mail and social media with 19% and 12% of responses, respectively.