Left to itself, big data isn’t of much use to anyone because it’s like an iceberg full of fresh water. These days with so much available on the internet, collecting and aggregating data is easy but that doesn’t mean most people are able to utilize the data and extract the right amount of value from it.
The other issue which is gaining in importance with every passing day is ensuring the safety of the data. Marketers are among the biggest and most effective users of big data as they have to keep pace with the changing preferences and priorities of today’s consumers.
The consumers may engage businesses across multiple touchpoints, devices and marketing channels, from digital and social sites to the ecommerce sites where the real transactions take place. A marketer needs to be with the consumer for the most part of this journey if not the entire journey although it’s very difficult to stay connected with consumers who are interacting with multiple businesses across multiple devices and channels at speeds not known before. It’s a massive challenge for the marketer to understand what drives and influences the consumers’ behavior. The marketer must track the cross channel journey to be able to account for the impact of traditional media in a customer’s movements. Was it a TV ad that influenced a customer to visit a particular website or was it a radio jingle?
Leaving the cross channel movement aside, it’s a huge challenge to get an accurate picture of how customers are moving from device to device or app to app. A critical part of understanding the consumers’ purchase journey is to know how they connect mobile app to mobile web environments. With the astronomical number of apps in operation it’s almost impossible to track whether customers clicking on in-app ads, are frequently sent to the browser for the brand’s website. That’s because such transition alters that phone’s external identifier from a device ID to a cookie. Tracking such transitions from app to web and back again, at scale, is one of the biggest challenges that marketers face today.