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Making Big Data Work for Retailers

Posted by Brian Berg Google+

 

If the words “big data” get your pulse racing, make you toss and turn at night, or, worse still, prompt countless internal meetings about how to deal with it all, you are not alone.  Marketers, particularly retailers, are dealing with massive volumes of customer data coming at them from a multitude of channels and myriad customer touchpoints.  Those touchpoints house a wealth of intelligence on customer preferences, habits, and desires that could help you strengthen your relationship with your customer.  Many marketers are looking at this data for retail content marketing inspiration.

 

Yet retailers are not entirely sure about how to get their arms around the growing volumes of data, much less how to derive meaning from and act on it. The good news is that collecting and using customer information is nothing new.  Retailers have always studied customer patterns, looked for what motivates people, and built relationships with customers by telling them engaging stories and giving them what they want.  Now, they’re just attempting to map content to those behaviors as a way to respond and engage with them online.

 

No matter how quickly we collect and analyze it, data is always historical.  The most we can hope to get from data is an accurate view of what happened in the past and identify patterns.  But, if you look at data in a certain way, structured around people, places and things, for instance, you can establish context, derive meaning from the data, and learn a lot about your customers and their preferences.  And, if you can learn enough about your customers’ behavior, you can start to predict what your customers might want, then target them very personally with messaging, content, and offers.

 

To learn more about big data for retailers, contact a member of the BB Direct Team at (866) 501-6273.