The Right Analysis of Big Data Is Changing The Fate of Companies

Analysis of Big Data – Large companies have been using the data-based approach for a long time. This allows them to manage risk, improve products, and reach new audiences. 

Research based on Big Data allows you to get an objective assessment of the company’s position in the market, customer needs, and the effectiveness of various promotion methods. Data owners make these analytics accessible to SMBs.

Analysis of Big Data: Too Big Data

The Right Analysis of Big Data Is Changing The Fate of Companies

Humanity has generated more than 64 zettabytes of information by 2021, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC). 

If we translate this number into bytes that are more understandable to us, we get a figure with twenty-one zeros. The company previously predicted it would reach 175 zettabytes of data generated globally in 2025, but analysts are constantly revising their estimates upwards.

Marketsandmarkets estimated the total size of the Big Data market at almost $139 billion last year. It is expected that in five years this figure will increase by more than 1.5 times.

It may seem that at some point the usual analytics was simply called the fashionable phrase Big Data. In fact, everything is not so obvious. The big data market includes hardware and software that help aggregate and manage Big Data, as well as consulting support and training. 

And most importantly, Big Data involves the processing of really large data arrays that are aggregated from different sources. This can be depersonalized information about the user’s socio-demographic characteristics, income level, consumption profile, presence of children or a car, and interests. 

Such volumes of data cannot be calculated without special equipment: for example, Big Data of the MTS operatorstores and processes about 20 petabytes of data, which is comparable to the information stored in the Lenin Russian State Library, but not in one, but in 440 of its copies.

Working with big data requires a special infrastructure and competencies that individual players in the Russian market have, primarily IT and telecom companies. 

According to experts interviewed by Vedomosti, even a large company often has difficulties not only with independent qualitative analysis of Big Data, but also with its collection. The reasons can be different – from a lack of specialists to a lack of infrastructure.

According to Andrei Vorobyov, head of the Data Lab at dentsu Russia, research should be outsourced, since uploading, processing and aggregating data requires a lot of labor.

“The main difficulty lies in the huge amount of data that takes a lot of time to upload, process and analyze. For example, if an error is found in the data, they must be reloaded. We have very tight deadlines in our business, and their violation is critical for our advertiser clients. 

There is also a difficulty in cross-validating data when working with multiple sources of this data. They should not contradict each other, and this happens quite often, – Andrey Vorobyov concludes.

It is extremely important to have a partner who can work with these tasks. At this time, the company can focus on designing the data and looking for breakthrough patterns in it.”

Telecom approach

Telecom companies are one of the main “holders” of big data in the world. On their basis, operators develop products for the external market that allow businesses to analyze the audience, highlight key trends or evaluate the effectiveness of various promotion tools.

For example, MTS has been involved in big data for six years and has one of the largest analytics teams in the market and a database of 65 million subscriber profiles. 

The company launched the MTS Research service, which allows customers to receive audience or market research based on Big Data analysis. According to Elena Melnikova, Director of Advertising Technologies at MTS, the service combined Big Data competencies with the company’s own marketing expertise.

“As a result, we have created a service that allows you to get detailed analytics about who, how and where uses products and services, which customers are prone to churn, and how exactly advertising affects sales. 

This is the end-to-end cross-channel analytics that we ourselves have always lacked when working with contractors,” says Elena Melnikova, Director of Advertising Technologies at MTS.

She points out that the product and marketing strategies of world and Russian market leaders are based on big data. 

MTS itself uses Big Data to effectively develop the network, manage the schedule of retail employees, create a recommender system for an online store and ecosystem services: a bank, a KION cinema (12+), MTS Library applications (17+) and MTS Music ( 12+), and other products. “The economic effect from the use of data amounts to tens of billions of rubles,” Elena Melnikova draws attention.

Audience under the microscope

The MTS Research service allows you to analyze the audience, the market situation, and assess the company’s competitiveness based on Big Data and audience surveys. 

The data obtained is used in order to more competently approach the formation of a marketing strategy or solve targeted tasks: work with outflow, evaluate the impact of advertising on sales and the effectiveness of different advertising formats and channels.

Big Data allows you to create a portrait of the audience and segment it by more than five thousand parameters. In what location are customers most often, what gender and age representatives buy different goods, how much do they earn, what are they interested in, do they have children.

By analyzing the answers to these questions, you can determine the needs of potential or existing customers, find out what purchases they are going to to do in the near future, and which ones will definitely not be included in their budget.

Detailed audience analysis allows you to:

  • Improve the product according to the needs of customers;
  • formulate value for each segment of the audience;
  • save the budget by refusing to promote to an audience that is not interested in the product.

The analysis can also be aimed at solving a specific problem: for example, finding customers who tend to refuse to interact with the company. The service allows you to highlight the general characteristics of this audience, the most likely reasons for the decline in interest in the product and take measures to retain customers.

Big data also allows you to see the real impact of marketing on a business. For example, they make it possible to evaluate the effectiveness of an advertising campaign or specific advertising formats not only by the usual conversion rate – the number of “clicks” on a banner or video.

But also by how many of these people eventually bought the product. This is possible thanks to the comparison of fiscal data with the data of the advertising platform and Big Data analytics. As a result, businesses see a direct correlation between marketing activities and sales growth.

How Big Data brings customers and generates profit

Analytics allows you to reorient your business to a data-based approach and thereby attract new customers, reduce costs, minimize risks and effectively allocate the budget for promotion.

For example, Toyota in Russia increased visits to dealerships by 30% using smart advertising based on big data. Cameras on digital billboards highlighted in real-time the brands of cars from which people most often “transfer” to Toyota, and included ads if they found cars that matched the criteria.

Banks use data to improve the quality of customer service and optimize costs. But the main task of “big data” in banks is risk management and the fight against fraud. 

For example, analyzing data from a large number of clients reveals that people of a certain age or profession are more likely to experience late payments. In data analysis, banks often team up with telecom companies to determine more accurate survey results based on a broader base of the latter.

Big data is in demand in retail. A large hypermarket used the MTS Research service to analyze the reasons for the outflow of its audience in 2020. Using Big Data, external research and surveys of respondents, experts were able to understand exactly how the pandemic has affected the way customers consume. 

They began to make fewer purchases in large hypermarkets and shopping centers and more often in convenience stores and through the Internet. Because of this, the outflow of buyers of chain hypermarkets reached an average of 45%, although the volume of spending on groceries did not decrease. 

The attention of analysts was attracted by the fact that the audience of such stores has become less likely to use personal transport and carsharing. It was decided to compensate for the outflow with the help of marketing activities aimed at car owners. This strategy proved to be effective.

Marketers actively use Big Data to evaluate the effectiveness of campaigns. For example, a large pharmaceutical company, a manufacturer of a popular antiviral drug, launched an advertising campaign through the MTS Marketer platform, after analyzing the audience using the MTS Research service. 

Targeting created on the basis of Big Data and the right audience for it increased the number of clicks to the pharmaceutical company’s website by more than a third (by 36%). 

Interestingly, the results could be even higher if the chosen strategy for promoting the product did not include predominantly women, but was “distributed” among consumers of both sexes – this was also found out thanks to Analysis of Big Data.

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