B2B Marketing article written by Alex Blyth features Caspar Craven from Trovus

Apparently businesses have reached the frontier of ‘big data’. But what is this supposed new landscape and should marketers be hurrying to stake their claim? Alex Blyth investigates

In May 2011, McKinsey coined the phrase ‘big data’. It was one of those phrases that captured the imagination. It encapsulated an idea whose time had come. Moreover it promised a solution to the age-old marketing problem of data. It was an idea that made marketers throughout the world sit up and take notice.

The findings of the report, entitled Big Data – the next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity were genuinely startling. For example, the authors claimed that a retailer using big data to the full could increase its operating margin by more than 60 per cent. It claimed that if the US healthcare industry was to use big data creatively and effectively, the sector could create more than $300 billion in value every year.

McKinsey wrote, “The amount of data in our world has been exploding, and analysing large data sets – so-called big data – will become a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and consumer surplus.”

It is certainly an exciting idea for B2B marketers. As every B2B marketer knows – many through bitter experience – data is the cornerstone of a successful campaign, and it is incredibly hard to get right. Due to company changes, job moves, and so on, business data erodes at a frightening rate. So fast, in fact, that few B2B marketers have had the time or budget to raise their perspective above the basic factual data to the more exciting behavioural data awaiting them on the horizon.

So is big data really the answer that marketers are looking for? Or is it just a passing buzz phrase? And, most importantly, if it really can solve the problem of data once and for all, how can B2B marketers begin to use it to optimum effect?

Affordable technology

Leveraging big data isn’t easy though. If it was everyone would already be doing it. In fact, many B2B marketers are aware of these possibilities but are so daunted by the size and complexity of the data in front of them that they are yet to use it as fully as they might. Technology is essential. With data on this scale it is impossible for humans to trawl through it, extracting the relevant facts and spotting the trends. Even if they could, they would do it too slowly.
However, technology is only the beginning. As Craven adds, “The real problem for most companies is not getting hold of the data or the technology but finding the talent pool that can drive these apps properly, create the data strategies required and interpret the findings appropriately.”

Quinn comments, “Gone are the days when organisations could rely on a pile of business cards, targeted phone calls, long lunches, and mass spam emails. B2B marketers need to employ tools to automate the process of generation and extraction.”

The good news is, there is now a host of tools that will help them do exactly this. Furthermore, these are increasingly affordable to even small companies.

“With the advent of business intelligence tools, such as SPSS or Tableau, which are cost-effective, hugely powerful and enterprise class, now not only global businesses running SAP or SAS can gain the depth of analysis and the competitive advantage that embracing big data brings,” says Caspar Craven, director and co-founder of Trovus, a customer intelligence consultancy.

Shortage of talent

The McKinsey report also identified this issue as the key challenge, stating that by 2018, the US alone could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills, as well as a deficate of 1.5 million managers and analysts with the know-how to use the analysis of big data to make effective decisions.

There are undoubtedly issues of privacy, security, intellectual property and even liability that need to be addressed in a big data world, but most experts agree that the talent shortage is the biggest issue. Alan Thorpe, business development director at Indicia, says, “The barrier to using big data is not a technological one. The main challenge for marketers is to ensure they have the right analytical skills to release value.”

To read the full article visit: http://www.b2bmarketing.net/knowledgebank/demand-generation/features/demand-generation-does-%E2%80%98big-data%E2%80%99-mean-better-data

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