3 Reasons Why You Need a Smart Data Solution

Do you remember some Coca-Cola, Sears & Roebuck, or Campbell’s Soup commercials? Do you remember how brands reminded you? Maybe you heard the ad on the radio or saw it on TV.

Decades ago, businesses invested thousands to millions of dollars in advertising, but they lacked the data to quantify the campaign’s effectiveness. They could quantify the effectiveness of the channel (e.g. direct mail, radio ads), but not always the campaign.

Most businesses continued to spend lots of money to attract customers because they were able to profit. Market research firms and advertising providers had a recession-proof business because companies needed their service to sell more products and services.

Since the end of the 20th century, the marketing and advertising industry experienced a significant growth in its ability to gather and track data analytics.

The Prehistoric Origin of Big Data

Banners were the start of online advertising, where site owners used their digital property to generate revenue. Prodigy displayed banners to promote Sears products among their broad range of networked services, including news, weather, and shopping. 

The first, biggest success of online banner advertising happened on the first commercial online magazine HotWired. The first AT&T’s ad on HotWired had a 44% click-through rate.  

At the very end of the 20th century, Google launched its AdWords search advertising program. Now, we have Facebook, Outbrain, YouTube, Taboola, and Twitter as some of the best online advertising options.  

Because of the significant levels of data generation through social media and other online services, big data has taken a role of prominence. Machine learning, A/B testing, and cloud computing are some components that helped to form the ecosystem of big data.

Big Data Helps

Big data is working for many companies.

Walgreens used big data in their in-store health clinics. Their advanced analytics is improving the assessment of patient conditions and offer recommendations to improve overall health, while discouraging future medical costs.

Southwest Airlines are using big data through speech analytics to understand behaviors to improve customer interactions and increase loyalty.

Sprint is using big data to improve the customer experience to decrease rates of attrition. They handle billions of daily transactions, but their big data analytics increased their capacity by 90%.

But Big Data Is Not Smart…

Every day, 270 billion email messages are sent. Every day, there is an average of 4.75 billion items shared on Facebook. Each minute, 500+ hours of video are being uploaded to YouTube. That’s just a tiny sample which still excludes medical records, consumer preferences, and others. 

Big data represents massive amounts of structured and unstructured data. Data volumes are doubling in size about every two years, but it’s not enough to just store it. Big data needs to be filtered and prepared for context, which becomes smart data.  

Smart data is the information that makes sense. Smart data is the results from intelligent algorithms. It represents the highs and lows in sales volume instead of the long list of weekly sales.

Why You Need a Smart Data Solution

1.   Insightful Analysis

Smart data goes beyond big data through insightful analysis. Imagine you are the marketing manager for your business and you want to increase audience engagement on social media. It is more valuable to know when your audience is most active on social media to post at those times. It is better than posting three or four social posts daily without giving much regard to the engagement statistics.

An insightful analysis could encourage you to leverage existing social networks to enable captive portal user engagement through surveys or promotions.   

2. Quality Over Quantity

Big data is generous. It gives a lot, but the quality is often questionable. Big data can tell you about the population of your customers by country, which can help in changing your marketing efforts. Such data is helpful, but it does not tell you enough.

Smart data filters out the minutiae and keeps the important data. An example is to have location analytics to know which cities have the highest usage of your product or service. That quality data can optimize the return on investment of your marketing budget.

3. Time Is Priceless

Big data is exactly that, BIG! It requires a lot of time to process the information.

Do you have enough staff to process the information efficiently? Most businesses don’t have the manpower and wish they had an efficient solution. Fortunately, they don’t have to wish anymore.

With smart data, you can expedite information processing and access intelligent data to solve many of your business problems.    

Our Last Words

Big data is the step in the right direction, but it is not the finish line. If you want better data, you need a smart data solution.

If you value insightful analysis, quality, and time, consider Zoox Smart Data as your solution. We leverage existing networks with our cloud software to enable user engagement, location analytics, and powerful demographics and psychographics that assist our clients’ marketing initiatives.