The Key Findings on Big Data Study

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Businesses are getting more inclined in using big data as part of their digital marketing structure that has made a significant impact on how they do their business and the quality of the marketing outcomes. Major big data studies were conducted in order to survey various digital marketing enterprises that have taken digital marketing initiative of using big data as a tool of enabling their company’s competence in embracing the fast evolving digital marketing industry. Digital marketing in Atlanta has surveyed the available big data business cases and here are some of the major key findings on companies embracing the big data market:

1. Bigger returns are realized using big data for business

The majority of companies using big data for their business reported to have experienced bigger return of profits (ROIs) after using big data as part of their digital marketing program. About 53% of these surveyed companies that used at least one big data initiative since 2012, 43% reported to have experienced higher ROI which is about 25% boost on their regular income. US based enterprises lead the list of these big data driven companies that experience higher ROI. Only about one third of companies in the US remain to be aloof from using big data for business.

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It can be noted that the region in Asia Pacific has the lowest number of business enterprise using big data initiative of only 39%. Not the majority of companies in European countries are using big data initiatives at only 45%. Mexican and Indian companies are known to embrace big data more for business.

2. Investments on big data is growing

Both the small and large enterprises are getting more focused on big data investment. The amount spent for data research and acquisition is sizeable which can be calculated by average and median survey respondents. According to big data business survey the median spending on big data investment is $10 million while those under the average survey data spending is at $88 million in the year 2012. The case study surveyors believe that the median data is more reliable and accurate. The statistics revealed that there is a big polarity in investment according to the spread between mean and median spending of companies on big data.

The mobile and telecommunication companies have a remarkable showing of investing on big data alongside the travel and hospitality companies. The General Electric for instance is spending $1 billion of investment for more than 4 years on big data in order to address the growing numbers of their subscribers and mobile unit consumers every year. They leverage on big data technology in order to manage the massive amount of data and information flowing through every transaction.

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It is expected that by 2015 the number of companies to invest on big data will grow by 75% especially within the UK and Australian regions.

3. Business industries reaping more benefits from big data

It came unexpectedly that the logistics and financial industries reap more benefits of higher returns of profit from big data as compared to the sales and marketing industries that tend to spend more budget for big data infrastructures. Out of the 75 surveyed business functions, the finance and logistics industry came prominent. In a 2012 survey, logistics and finance take the largest area of the big data pie with about 78% returns of profit from logistics and 69% from finance. The result is far from the expected projections from the businesses that will earn higher returns of their big data investment.

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4. Cultural challenges at par with technological big data challenges

Integrating big data within the organization imposes a big challenge among companies. Enterprises reveal that organizational culture is just as challenging as making it part of the business intelligence structure. Surveyed companies on big data business case studies expressed that their biggest challenge is on how to make every business unit and department in the organization share business data within the organizational structure.

Technological issues only come second, as a matter of fact, which deal with the challenges of the three V’s namely data velocity, data volume and data variety. It can be drawn from the study that organizations have become too protective of their data that it hinders the data sharing ability of employees to assist them in decision making. This becomes a strong cultural challenge for companies embracing the big data process as the failure to make it a part of the organizational culture can result in preventing companies to tap valuable data for efficient data management and usage. Handling the three V’s is another organizational challenge of paramount importance among business enterprises. Both also impose a challenge on developing trust by the data managers and analysts to optimize the ability of their business marketing strategies to use analytics for better marketing outcomes.

5. More than the majority of businesses use structured big data

Only about 49% of business enterprises are using unstructured and semi-structured data while the remaining 51% leverage on structured data for digital marketing. It is also pointed out that about 70% of the big data acquisition comes from internal sources. Structured data are numerical such as financial or order and may be compiled and organized neatly in database management software (as in spreadsheets or list). The unstructured data are more complex such as those from digitized videos and audios and cannot be compiled in older database format. It is often difficult to analyze the data and there is a need to process them in some manner.

Companies within the North American region have the highest percentage using structured data while those using unstructured data come from the Asia Pacific region. The preference of companies in using structured data is the ease of managing data in a more organized manner to analyze them. In some cases, natural language processing is often required in order to extract information from the unstructured data which is a challenge among businesses in the health care industry. Physicians are often using images and nurses’ notes as among others that are considered as unstructured data that need a more accurate means of analyzing the data available from them.

Read More:

• The Big Picture of Big Data for 2014
• Top 5 Problems with Big Data