Big Data In Marketing: 9 Examples & Use Cases

Keep on reading to discover the benefits of incorporating big data into marketing initiatives, common challenges, and 9 examples of big data marketing you can start implementing today. 

Understanding the role of big data in marketing 

Before diving into the examples and use cases, let's grasp the concept of big data and its role in marketing. 

Big data refers to the massive volume of both structured and unstructured data (images, social media posts, videos, …) that floods businesses daily. 

To illustrate the scale, consider this: every day, people search Google 8.5 billion times, send out 500 million tweets, and watch up to 1 billion hours of video on Youtube. 

All this data, collected from various sources like social media, customer interactions on your website, marketing campaign clicks, and more, gives you invaluable insights into consumer behavior, preferences, and trends. 

By leveraging advanced analytics and data-driven methodologies, marketers can gain a profound understanding of their target audience. This means making smarter decisions and coming up with marketing strategies that are backed up by solid data. 

4 benefits of big data in marketing 

The benefits of embracing big data in marketing are numerous, giving companies a competitive edge in the dynamic market landscape. Here are some key advantages:

1. A single view of the customer: Big data empowers marketers to consolidate customer data from diverse sources like CRM and customer databases, records of web interactions, data sets of their purchases, etc. This means you create a holistic 360 view of individual preferences, purchase history, and engagement patterns. And when you know customers that well, you can tailor marketing efforts to hit the right notes. 
2. Improved decision-making: With data-driven marketing, you’re basing your decisions on real-time insights. This means you can quickly adjust campaigns and prices or change up your promotion plans based on the latest market trends and consumer behavior. 
3. Maximized ROI: By optimizing marketing efforts through data analysis, businesses can allocate resources more efficiently, maximizing return on investment (ROI) and minimizing wasted ad spend.
4. New product development: Big data provides a treasure trove of information about customer needs and pain points, aiding in the development of innovative products and services that cater precisely to market demands.

9 examples and uses cases of big data marketing 

Now, let's explore 9 examples and use cases that demonstrate the transformative power of big data in marketing:

1. Discover new customer acquisition levers

Customers leave a footprint every time they interact with our digital marketing content and the apps we build. 

Use these breadcrumbs to dig into the reasons why certain leads turned into customers.

With big data analytics tools, you can shift through vast amounts of data to discover which lever was the crucial differentiator between a lead and a customer. Was it your digital marketing target audience, the novel communication/referral channel, the copywriting used, the choice of visuals, specific demographics, or something else? 

Knowing the answer helps you focus your energies on what actually works. Turning eyeballs into paying customers. 

👉Check our guide to automated big data marketing analytics that can help you speed up insights discovery.

2. Segment audiences for a personalized boost in customer engagement

Big data analytics helps you segment customers based on behavior, preferences, and demographics. 

This segmentation allows for highly personalized marketing campaigns that deliver relevant content to the right audience, increasing engagement and conversions.

Here’s how you do it with Keboola:

1. Collect and unify your customer data, including web/app interactions, past marketing campaigns, and CRM data with Keboola. Just a few clicks and you’re ready for the next step.  
2. Next, use Keboola’s Transformations to apply machine learning segmentation algorithms. Split your customers into different segments based on their activity.  
3. Feed the segments back into the communication app of your choice. Keboola can do this with a couple of clicks.
4. Roll out personalized campaigns for each customer segment to boost engagement.

👉Pro tip: Use Keboola+ThoughtSpot to build and deliver hyper-targeted email messaging in a couple of clicks (no data engineering knowledge required!)

3. Use predictive analytics to communicate the right message

Apply predictive analytics to historical data to anticipate customer behavior and preferences. This foresight empowers marketers to proactively tailor their strategies to meet future demands and optimize their marketing efforts.

For example, by combining your stock levels with a demand forecast, you can automate the promotion of in-stock items that are predicted to surge in demand to speed up product movement out of your warehouse.

4. Foster customer retention and loyalty programs 

Big data helps you identify factors contributing to customer churn and pinpoint the specific customers who are most likely to jump ship. 

Armed with this knowledge, marketers can design targeted customer loyalty programs and retention strategies to retain valuable customers.

5. Use price optimization to increase revenue and profits 

Analyze market trends and competitor pricing with big data to optimize your pricing decisions for enhanced competitiveness and profitability.

Here’s an example. Olfin Car is a leading car dealer in the Czech Republic with additional services in the field of financing, authorized car service, and insurance.

With Keboola, Olfin Car was able to automate data collection of all the product offerings and pricing points across their competitors. By using advanced pricing algorithms, Olfin Cars optimized the pricing of its products and services. This led to a 760% increase in revenues in a single quarter. 

👉Check what else Olfin Car did with big data to drive growth or learn how to set up your data-driven pricing.

6. Keep a finger on the pulse with sentiment analysis 

Big data tools can analyze customer sentiment and feedback from various sources, such as social media and reviews. 

This sentiment analysis helps businesses understand how customers perceive their brand and products, enabling them to address concerns and reinforce positive experiences at scale.

7. Tap into A/B testing to discover what works

Don’t waste your marketing efforts on market research when identifying what communication strategy works best.

Instead, test it.

Leveraging big data for A/B testing allows marketers to compare the performance of different marketing strategies and identify the most effective approaches in a much shorter time.

A/B testing showcase: A subject line worth its weight in gold - or 2 million dollars, to be precise.  

Obama’s presidential campaign will go down as one of the most successful A/B tests in history.

What did the marketing team do? They rolled out different emails to a smaller batch of their email list first, testing the impact of different subject lines. The champion was then sent to the rest of the list. 

The result? The top-performing email left the underperformer in the dust, bringing in extra 2 million dollars in donations.

8. Optimize the customer journey with big data insights

Understanding the customer journey through big data analysis enables marketers to streamline touchpoints and improve overall customer experience.

For example, Marketing Intelligence used Keboola to reconstruct the customer journeys along multiple touchpoints and across different attribution models.

With careful analysis of how different channels and pathways interact with each other and what customer segment tends to convert, they helped their client save 30% on marketing costs while increasing acquisition by informing them what conversion paths work best. 

👉Read the full customer success story here. 

9. Build data products that delight customers 

Use all the before-mentioned big data practices together to build products that address your customers with delightful messages.

Rohlik, the e-commerce unicorn, uses Keboola and real-time machine learning algorithms, to identify the food items that will expire soon, discount them, and automatically advertise them to price-conscious consumers (discovered through customer segmentation).

This end-to-end automated marketing initiative helps Rohlik reduce food waste while addressing the needs of a targeted customer profile. 

👉Read the full customer success story here. 

Challenges of big data in marketing 

While big data marketing holds immense potential, the use of big data analytics for driving marketing successes also presents several challenges:

1. Data integration 

Consolidating data from various sources into a coherent and actionable format can be complex and time-consuming. Each data source is in a different location and needs a lot of cleaning before it can be used.

With tools like Keboola, you can bring all of your (client’s) data in one place in a matter of seconds. Choose from over 250 pre-built connectors and start building your data pipelines with just a few clicks.  

2. Data governance 

Ensuring data security, privacy, and compliance with regulations is crucial in the era of big data. However, this also places a hefty burden on marketing teams.

Opt for a big data tool like Keboola, which takes care of data security, information privacy, and data access management while you use the platform for implementing big data use cases. 

That way, you can spend more time crafting persuasive marketing campaigns and less time worrying about data governance. 

3. Data quality and accuracy 

The reliability of insights heavily depends on the quality and accuracy of the data collected. 

Without testing the data pipelines generating your marketing insights, you risk allocating your marketing budget to ineffective communication strategies.

Luckily, solutions like Keboola help you write a data quality test once and reuse it each time you collect new data. You can even let other members of your organization copy your solution and apply it to their big data use case.

4. Lack of skilled personnel 

The demand for data-savvy marketers often outstrips the supply, making it challenging to find skilled personnel proficient in handling big data.

Alternatively, marketing teams depend on the IT or data department for their work. This often introduces friction and causes delays in marketing activities.

However, there’s no need to hire an artificial intelligence wiz or learn how to code. Keboola offers many no-code tools that help marketers build data solutions without writing a single line of code: from Visual Flow Builder to no-code transformations, the marketing team can serve their own big data needs.

5. Real-time analysis and action 

Timely data analysis is essential for capitalizing on emerging opportunities, which requires robust real-time data gathering and analyzing capabilities.

Solutions like Keboola help you keep your data fresh with real-time data streaming capabilities without needing to reinvent the technical wheel. 

👉Learn more about Keboola’s Data Apps here. 

Turn your big data challenges into opportunities with Keboola 

To overcome these challenges and fully harness the potential of big data in marketing, consider Keboola as the all-in-one solution for big data marketing. 

Keboola offers an intuitive platform that streamlines data integration, governance, and data science, allowing data teams in marketing to derive valuable insights efficiently:

1. Integrate data with a couple of clicks with 250+ pre-built components, including Google Ads, Meta Ads, CRMs, and other marketing data sources.
2. Out-of-the-box data governance: Spend more time launching big data use cases and less time worrying about security and privacy.
3. Automate data quality and accuracy end-to-end.
4. No need for a CS degree. With the easy-to-use Visual Flow Builder and no-code transformations, the marketing team can serve their big data needs. 
5. Automate your marketing insights in real time: Keboola helps you keep your data fresh with real-time data streaming capabilities. 

Ready to unleash the power of big data in your marketing efforts? Sign up for Keboola today for free or book a demo.