Millennials are making a huge impact on the world. Since passing the Baby Boomers in population in 2012, it was forecasted that business practices needed to shift their marketing strategies soon. Well, ‘soon’ has arrived and by 2017, you’ll need to focus your marketing more toward this generation.
Big data is going to be a key factor in your practices, whether you own a registered office address online or physical location. It’s going to help you decipher through all the information to help with forecasting your marketing. Let’s explore the many ways big data can be used to market toward Millennials in 2017.
1. Big Data Helps You Identify Your Market
Essentially, big data involves compiling data about the consumers interested or currently purchasing products. To progress with your marketing strategy, and to get the most use from your big data, you’ll need to create a buyer persona. This is going to help you narrow down your customer base within the large group of millennials.
Since Big Data heavily influences the need to create a buyer persona, it’s one of the top ways it influences your marketing. You compile information and create this persona to see who your customers are and it’s going to influence many other aspects of your marketing.
2. Big Data Provides You with Trend Forecasts
Trend forecasts were originally seen in the fashion industry. However, the use of big data has given all niches access to this powerful tool. Using the information provided by your buyer persona, you’ll match that with some upcoming trends in your industry.
Big data also helps you identify the platforms millennials are using, so you know where to reach them. According to Emarketer, there are over 48 million millennials on Instagram, which has encouraged many companies to use Instagram bots to reach them. Big data will help you identify other marketing opportunities as new ones open up.
Whether you’re in the fitness, accounting or any in-between industry, these trends can be tracked in a similar way. Using social media posts, PPC and browsing habits, you can easily gather enough information to be ahead in your niche. Millennials are all about the “next best thing”, so a business can’t afford to fall behind on the times.
You never want to make assumptions about your demographics. Sales data may show that millennials are interested in products you never expected.
For example, a growing number of millennials are interested in purchasing some great drones. Fortune recently reported that drone sales are expected to rise from 2.5 million in 2015 to 7 million by 2020. Millennials are driving many of these sales. You would never know that there is a demand for drones without evaluating the data carefully.
3. Big Data Helps You Balance Prices
Millennials seem to have some odd spending habits that have caused a shift in spending in the US. They love a bargain, but they are also willing to pay more for a quality item without a problem. However, with the internet at the tip of their fingers, they can easily find prices that make them content from either an online retailer or physical location.
Competing with others’ in your niche, you want to be as proactive with your pricing optimization. Big data uses a real-time merchandising system in its algorithm. This helps with understanding current price trends and helps you adjust appropriately to the price trends. For most businesses, big data has removed all manual labor processes such as this.
4. Make Final Sales with Big Data
Internet shopping has made it mandatory for every physical location to have an online presence as well. The entire experience should be flawless and easily mapped out for them when they shop at an online store. However, what if your customers can’t find their credit or debit card? If that’s the only option you’re giving them, it could potentially be ruining sales.
Big Data trends can help you utilize the most updated apps and widgets to help make your website as user-friendly as possible. No matter how much you market, if you don’t have the right payment options, you won’t make final sales.
Compiling information through the system, you can see just how far the customers get in their shopping experience. Where do they stop? If you notice they only add things in the cart but never go into the cart, this could identify that your shopping cart might be inconveniently placed. Alternatively, if they stop at the credit or debit card payment screen, it could mean you’ll need to add a program to help you.
Millennials are all about the experience when they’re shopping. So, knowing their problems and being able to provide solutions is the only way to build longevity within this generation.
5. Big Data Helps You Refine Your Outreach Strategy
Millennials may be active on digital media, but they won’t find your brand on their own. You need an effective outreach strategy to connect with them.
Big data helps you identify strategies that work and build on them. For example, you can use Excel to improve your SEO, which helps you attract more organic search traffic from Google and Bing. These search engines account for close to three quarters of all Internet traffic and these visitors tend to convert better, so you will earn more engaged leads with these strategies.
Heidi Besik, group product marketing manager at Adobe Social told Dice that big data is crucial for social media marketing as well. Since marketers are spending more money on social media, they need to know that their budgets will be spent effectively.
“We’re at a point where it’s not simply about pulling a lot of data, but really understanding why something performed well and how to replicate that,” she said. “This requires a comprehensive approach to the metrics that are considered, going beyond what we traditionally see with ‘likes’ and ‘comments’ and looking at things like time-of-day engaged, audience profiles and time-spent-viewing for a medium like video.”
Instagram in particular is relying more heavily on big data. There are over 500 million active users on Instagram, which makes the social image sharing site an excellent advertising platform. However, brands need to take advantage of big data to understand their customers and target ads effectively. Vibbi and many other companies are providing new solutions for marketers that reach customers through Instagram.
Big Data Provides a Solid Marketing Foundation
The growth of technology and the internet have made it impossible for any one person to research for information on their business trends. There are big strategies you can steal from CEOs, which most require you to take advantage of the current internet tools out there. If your startup or small business has implemented a solid program for big data, it’s going to be a worthwhile expense to invest in.