Is big data just for big business? For several years, larger corporations have been gathering informative insights from this next-generation approach to data analysis. But now small businesses are finding ways to leverage this comprehensive data analysis for marketing insights.
Big data differs from traditional business intelligence. Rather than just exploring “what-if” scenarios, it looks for patterns in data that you might not recognize, and it looks for answers to questions that you didn’t even know to ask.
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Sykes Cottages uses big data to find new opportunities in online advertising. The company started as a family-owned business more than 25 years ago and now markets short-stay cottages on behalf of their owners. As an online marketing company, Sykes should eat and drink data, but four years ago it didn’t have a system to look at booking and online advertising data, let alone software that would look for patterns in that data.
Sykes Cottages got a hand from Marin Software, which uses big data to help its clients decide how much to bid for online advertising slots. Sykes also began collecting data about what people were searching for on its Website and combined it with other information, such as the location of customers and the cottages that they rented.
Sykes was able to harvest daily data to discover what triggered people to make a booking, whether it was an external online ad, a telephone call or a brochure download. That information helped the company optimize its online marketing campaigns to maximize revenue.
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