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When Big Data and the Cloud Team up for Marketing

Knowledge really is power when it comes to marketing, and businesses can use big data to learn more about their customers than ever before. However, getting the right infrastructure and expertise to use big data effectively can seem like a challenge for businesses. That’s where the Cloud comes in. The Cloud offers businesses of all sizes, from multi-nationals right down to tiny startups, a more cost effective and often more user friendly way to use big data. So just how do the Cloud and big data work together?

Big Data Offers Valuable Insights
As the following article shows, there’s no doubt that big data and marketing go hand-in-hand. Big data offers businesses the chance to gain detailed insights into customer behavior and desires. Those insights can be used to make a noticeable difference to the success of their products and services. Say for example a business wants to increase the effectiveness of their social media strategy.

By analyzing the available big data, they could learn:

What their customers are talking about on social media
Their customers’ social media habits, including when they log on, how often and for how long;
Which kinds of content generate the most likes or shares;
What kind of offers or contests attract the most interest;
Whether using social media for promotion leads to increased sales.
All of this information could be used to refine their social media strategy to get better results by giving their customers what they want. Big data has a myriad of uses, from sales to customer opinions, to which problems customers want solved and predicting future trends. Big data offers businesses massive amounts of information, among which are hidden the kind of treasures that can help a business stand out from its competitors.

Cloud Offers Flexibility
One thing big data doesn’t usually offer is flexibility. A business owner considering using big data could understandably get caught up in just how they’re going to harvest, store and manage all that data. That’s where the Cloud and big data play well together. Cloud-based big data solutions offer businesses a way of handling big data that is light on infrastructure and hardware, and high on flexibility and scalability.

There’s no need for a business to house the physical hardware to handle big data, as the Cloud service has already taken care of that. Using a Cloud-based service to handle big data also means a business can scale up and down as needed. If they need to run large queries over the short term, and then scale back again, they can. That means using big data just got more cost effective.

Bridging the Big Data Gap
For businesses who want to embrace big data but feel overwhelmed by the practicalities of analyzing it, the Cloud can help to bridge that gap. Although planning out what needs to be analyzed and how best to source and sort that data is still very important, planning big data analysis in the cloud isn’t quite as daunting as planning it on site.

When it comes to analyzing the data, Cloud-based applications are frequently designed with user-friendliness in mind; offering easy to use control panels and clear, easy to understand reporting. Businesses who want to make better use of big data should find that by shopping around they’ll be able to find a Cloud-bases solution that meets their needs. The Cloud has the potential to make big data more accessible without compromising on the quality of the insights, making big data and the Cloud a partnership that businesses of all sizes can benefit from.

About the Author: Tristan Anwyn writes on a wide variety of topics, including social media, branding, big data and Cloud applications.

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