Marketers Recognize that Big Data Is a Big Deal

How important is harnessing big data for your marketing efforts?

It’s something most marketers hadn’t even heard of until a few short years ago, but its importance—or at least, lip service about its importance—grew quickly.

When Econsultancy and Adobe queried client-side marketers worldwide about the most important areas of focus in 2012, big data wasn’t even in the picture. By 2013, the first year the response was an option, more than one-third of marketers chose it. Though it’s still not as important to most client-side marketers as understanding how mobile users research and buy, or finding out where and when people use different devices, more than two in five marketers know they need a handle on big data.

Perhaps that’s because they realize big data has the power to change their whole business strategy. A separate survey, conducted by KPMG in August 2013, found that nearly two-thirds of CFOs and CIOs in the Americas had changed their business strategy because of big data. The C-suite was nearly as likely to do so in Asia-Pacific, and the worldwide rate was 56%.

If big data is big enough to get a majority of marketers to change not just their marketing tactics but their whole business strategy, it should be big enough to pay attention to.

Courtesy of eMarketer