Big Data for Beginners: Improve Your Marketing Strategy

You might think Big Data is a field reserved for tech giants and global enterprises. However, for most marketers, it’s far from out of reach. Big data has become a powerful tool for marketing teams of all sizes, enabling smarter decision-making and more effective strategies. With the right approach and tools, you can harness big data to gain deeper insights, improve your marketing strategy,  personalize campaigns, and drive real results. 

What is big data and why is it important for marketers? 

Big data is a term used to describe datasets that are too large, unorganised and complex to be stored and analysed by traditional data-processing tools. The sources of big data can vary but include things like customer databases, payment systems, advertising tools, website logs, social media, financial data and more. The best way to understand big data for beginners is in terms of the 3 Vs: 

• Volume: The sheer amount of data generated every day - think terabytes or even petabytes.
• Velocity: The speed at which data is generated and needs to be processed. 
• Variety: The different types of data, including structured (like spreadsheets), semi-structured (like JSON files), and unstructured (like images or social media posts). Due to the variety of these file types, there are different steps needed to store, process and analyse each effectively. 

Source: SaaSworthy

For marketers, big data provides an opportunity to understand customers on a deeper level. It allows you to uncover patterns and trends that were previously invisible, helping you make more informed decisions and tailor your marketing strategy accordingly. 

Here are a few ways it’s reshaping the industry:

1. Better customer insights: By analyzing data from various sources like social media, web traffic, and purchase history, marketers can build a detailed picture of their target audience.
2. More targeted campaigns: With big data, marketers can segment audiences more effectively, delivering personalized messages that resonate with each.
3. Enhanced ROI tracking: Big data enables real-time tracking of marketing performance, allowing teams to optimize campaigns for maximum ROI and success.
4. Product development: Having access to your customer data gives marketers a better understanding of their customers’ pain points, helping in the development of innovative products that meet your audience's needs. 

Source: DemandSage

Examples of big data in marketing 

Big data can be categorized into several types that are particularly useful for marketers:

1. Customer data:
   • Demographics: Age, gender, location.
   • Behavioural data: Purchase history, website interactions.
   • Social media activity: Likes, shares, comments and watch time.
2. Operational data:
   • Website analytics: Page views, bounce rates, scroll depth.
   • Email metrics: Open rates, click-through rates, spam rate.
3. Financial data:
   • Sales trends: Revenue by product or region.
   • Ad spend: Cost-per-click, return on ad spend.

To help you understand big data better, here are some real-world examples:

• Netflix: They are synonymous with using big data to improve their service and customer satisfaction, most commonly through their recommendation feature. By analyzing vast amounts of user data including viewing habits, ratings and preferences, they personalize content recommendations for each viewer, helping to increase satisfaction and retention. 
  
  

Source: Inside Big data

• Amazon: In the same way airlines do, the ecommerce giant Amazon, is known to change their prices up to 2.5 million times a day based on the big data they gather and analyze. The price changes are determined by analyzing shopping patterns, competitor prices and how common the product is. 
• Uber Eats: Uber Eats leveraged big data from its experience as a taxi giant to revolutionize the food delivery market. Analyzing factors like meal preparation times and real-time traffic enabled them to accurately predict delivery times to ensure food arrives warm. This precision allows drivers to optimize routes and pick up multiple meals per trip, incentivized by bonuses. Uber Eats even uses weather data, with insights from meteorologists, to account for conditions that might affect delivery times. Their strategic use of big data not only enhances efficiency but also sets them apart in a competitive industry.

How to store big data

Storing big data effectively requires choosing the right solution based on your organization's needs. The two most popular options are data lakes and data warehouses, each suited to different purposes.

Data lakes are cost-effective for storing large volumes of raw, unstructured data from multiple sources. However, this data is often messy and requires data engineers and scientists to process it into usable formats. As such, it’s not immediately useful for marketers seeking actionable insights.

Data warehouses, on the other hand, store clean, organized, and structured data, making it ideal for marketers. This solution supports analytics, reporting, and forecasting, enabling teams to easily access insights and use data for decision-making. For most marketers, a data warehouse is the more practical and efficient choice.

Learn more about the differences between data warehouses and data lakes here.  

How to use big data to improve your marketing strategy

With the right tools, the possibilities on offer for how big data can improve your marketing strategy are abundant. Let’s take a look at some of these now.

Understand your target audience

Understanding your audience is at the heart of any successful marketing strategy. Big data eliminates guesswork, providing accurate insights into your audience’s behaviors, preferences, and demographics. You can track which visitors bring the most value, whether that’s through sales, engagement, or other marketing metrics, and analyze their journey from awareness to conversion. By identifying these patterns, you can design strategies that guide your audience seamlessly through the buyer’s journey. 

Optimize your marketing channels

Big data helps you identify which channels generate the most traffic, leads, and sales, ensuring you invest resources where they matter most. For instance, with the majority of traffic now coming from mobile devices, ensuring your content is mobile-optimized is crucial. Big data also reveals which platforms resonate most with your audience, enabling you to tailor your campaigns for maximum impact. Different demographics and target groups will use different methods to access information online. With the help of big data, you can know for sure which channels are most fitting for your target audience and you’ll be able to optimise your content accordingly.

Select the best keywords

Selecting the right keywords is crucial for driving organic traffic, improving search engine rankings, and reaching your target audience effectively. Big data tools like Google Ads Keyword Planner, SEMrush, and Ahrefs help identify high-performing keywords based on search trends, audience behavior, and competitor strategies. This data-driven approach allows marketers to uncover valuable long-tail keywords with lower competition but higher conversion potential, understand seasonal trends, and adapt strategies based on geographic differences.

Big data also enables competitive analysis, revealing the keywords competitors rank for and highlighting gaps you can capitalize on. When choosing keywords, it’s important to consider factors like search volume, keyword difficulty, user intent, and relevance to your brand. By leveraging these insights, marketers can create content and campaigns that attract the right audience, improve engagement, and ultimately boost conversion rates.

Personalise your content

Consumers today expect personalized experiences. Big data provides insights into customer behaviors, preferences, and purchasing patterns, enabling you to craft tailored campaigns, for example, ads showcasing products tailored to specific customer segments. Mass or blanket marketing is no longer an acceptable method of targeting, and it will weigh heavily on your resources with very little return. Big data gives marketers the confidence that they are targeting the right audience, at the right time, with the right content and via the right channels.

Track and refine your performance

Gone are the days of waiting for post-campaign results. Big data offers real-time insights into how your marketing efforts are performing, allowing you to make adjustments on the fly. Whether it’s tweaking blog topics, refining ad creatives, or reallocating budgets, continuous optimization keeps your campaigns effective. Big data provides you with the ability to fine-tune every minor detail of your entire marketing strategy as you go along, keeping you at the top of your game.

If emails get a higher open rate when you use emojis in the subject line, you can continue to use emojis with confidence. If certain calls-to-action on your website aren’t gaining enough engagement you can make edits, such as to the copy or colours used, to see if this changes anything. If your Facebook ads are outperforming your Google ads, then you might want to allocate your budget more towards Facebook. 

Measure return on investment (ROI)

ROI is the ultimate measure of success for any marketing campaign. Big data allows you to track every step of the customer journey, from clicking an ad to making a purchase, ensuring transparency and accountability. For example, by using tracking parameters within a URL you can show the exact pathway taken by a customer from the moment they clicked on your Facebook ad right through to making the actual purchase as a result. 

When measuring ROI, marketers should define clear goals and KPIs, ensure data accuracy, and consider the full customer lifecycle, including indirect impacts like brand awareness. It’s also crucial to use the right tools - like Hurree - to integrate data from multiple sources, streamline analysis, and deliver actionable insights that drive measurable success.

Turn your big data challenges into opportunities with Hurree

Big data has revolutionized how marketers approach their strategies, turning guesswork into actionable insights. With the right tools and a data-driven mindset, you can craft campaigns that truly resonate with your audience, optimize your resources, and stay ahead of the competition. Whether it’s understanding your audience, refining your channels, personalizing your content, or proving ROI, big data provides the clarity and precision needed to make better-informed decisions. And the more data you gather, the more impactful your strategies become over time.

Adopting a big data approach isn’t optional—it’s essential. If you’re not already leveraging big data, now’s the time to act before your competitors gain the upper hand. That’s where Hurree comes in.

Hurree’s intuitive, AI-powered platform simplifies data integration, visualization, and analysis, empowering marketing teams to transform complex data into actionable insights—without the need for technical expertise:

• Seamless data integration: Connect effortlessly to your favourite tools like Google Ads, Meta Ads, CRMs, and more in just a few clicks.
• Data you can trust: Ensure accuracy with real-time data updates and performance monitoring, so your insights are always fresh and reliable.
• No code, no problem: Our user-friendly dashboards and customizable widgets make it easy for marketers to analyze data without a technical background.
• Smarter insights, faster decisions: Automate reporting, track key metrics, and uncover trends that drive results - all in one platform.

Ready to turn your big data into big opportunities? Get started with Hurree today and unlock the insights that will elevate your marketing strategy.