“Without Big Data analytics, companies are blind and deaf, wandering out onto the web like deer on a freeway” — Geoffrey Moore, Author, Crossing The Chasm
“Big Data” is one of those massive megatrends that continues to gain attention along with the growing number of internet users and companies trying to convert this information into profits for their customers.
Like cryptocurrency, driverless cars, and artificial intelligence, these new technologies are taking us into uncharted territory.
In the case of Big Data, many B2B companies invest significant time and effort to collect massive amounts of data from websites to improve their decision-making capabilities.
The Big Data challenge
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But it’s anything but easy.
It’s an incredibly complex undertaking that’s only getting harder and harder to manage as the speed of business continues to accelerate, and the amount of data (hence, the Big in Big Data) gets bigger and bigger.
Plus gaps or undetected flaws can quickly weaken confidence and lead to poor results.
If your B2B company is using Big Data to try and gain a competitive edge, then you already know that the benefits already come with many problems.
It can be frustrating, challenging, and incredibly overwhelming.
But if you understand how to collect and analyze Big Data, you’ll be in a position to learn more about your prospects and customers and ultimately improve how you go to market.
According to McKinsey research, companies that make extensive use of customer analytics see a 126% profit improvement over their competitors.
That’s a substantial increase that shouldn’t be ignored.
A new opportunity
Companies like DataTrue are in a unique position to help B2B companies improve their data collection, analysis and implementation.
They monitor “tags” on your website that collect data, letting you measure traffic and optimize your online marketing. And these solutions make it easy for marketers, developers, and agencies to add tags and collect even more data.
Furthermore, accurate data will flow into a range of tools that support your reporting, help you uncover important insights, facilitate personalization, and enable you to allocate your marketing spend more effectively.
Creating and protecting your competitive advantage
As expected, new challenges mean new solutions.
B2B companies spend a lot of time and effort trying to establish a data measurement strategy, key performance indicators, and how they fit in with their overall business plans. Then they need to identify the analytics tools that are best suited to support these plans, goals, and objectives.
If you’re new to this kind of research, you can see how it’s challenging.
Data protection
Now that we’ve established the importance of Big Data, let’s talk about how to protect it.
If you’re familiar with Charlie Munger or websites like Farnam Street, then you’re no doubt familiar with Mental Models, which we can think of as filters, or rules of thumb, to help us make better decisions instead of getting misled by our cognitive biases.
And there are many…
Farnam Street identifies 113, although there are more, seeing as the human brain is so complex.
The goal of this article isn’t to provide an in-depth analysis of these mental models, but highlight the importance of objective analysis and human error and its relationship to Big Data to help marketers use the right approach.
Again, tools like the aforementioned DataTrue can help us make better business decisions by ensuring the quality of data collected and monitoring what’s important.
Which means better reporting, better user experiences, and better use of your marketing dollars so you can have confidence in your data through trustworthy analytics software.
Next steps
So how can you be sure the data you’re relying on is accurate and up-to-date?
Well, there’s good news and bad news.
The bad news is that data collection is complicated and needs constant refinement.
The good news is that your competitors probably aren’t doing a good job and are falling short in their efforts.
Finding the right partner to streamline the data collection and make sense of it should be your first action step.
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