Unless you’ve been in hibernation for the past 24 months, you’ve probably seen a few marketing buzzwords floating around in cyber sphere: gamification, visual storytelling and Big Data. While the first two are relatively easy to understand, the latter is worthy of some explanation since Big Data can provide you with a magical (and powerful) crystal ball that can not only have a dramatic impact on your postcard marketing campaign but your overall bottom line.
What It Is
If you head over to Google and search for the definition of Big Data, you’ll find everything from one sentence answers to 1500 word blog articles that try to explain what’s actually a very simple concept. Big Data is essentially a data bank where human actions are logged and quantified. This data can then be aggregated, analyzed and used by government agencies, pharmaceutical companies and even small businesses just like yours.
Where to Start
Thanks to advances in technology, the price tag associated with Big Data is now more affordable than ever. Google Trends, a platform that will let you conduct unlimited searches for free, monitors trending topics by quantifying how frequently a specific search-term is used over a specific period of time. The data produced can help you keep a pulse on your target market and the things they care about the most…all critical when it comes to the messaging of your postcard marketing campaigns.
Big Data Benefits
By embracing the power of Big Data, you’ll better understand your customers and prospective customers.
How?
By giving data a human face. Big Data can help you fine-tune who your ideal customer is by aggregating data related to age, gender, ethnicity, income and marital status, amongst a laundry list of other criteria. This data can then be used to define who your most valuable people (MVP’s) are, which in turn, can help you create super-targeted postcard marketing mailing lists full of prospects that will actually care about your product or service. Prospects Plus can even offer you free counts so you can size up your ideal target market BEFORE you mail. Check out their video to learn about the type of Big Data available.
What’s more, when you have insights regarding your target market at such a granular level, you’ll be able to modify your messaging to truly “speak” to these individuals, which can dramatically improve your response rates.
Additional benefits of Big Data include:
- Predicting Customer Behavior – If you were a psychic and could accurately predict the decisions your customers are going to make sometime in the not-so-distant future, how would that affect your business? Big Data might not be a crystal ball, but it can aggregate 3rd party data to help you successfully predict customer purchases, as well as shifts in behavior and sensitivity to price increases. These are all important in direct mail campaigns.
- Real Time Personalization – Relevancy and timeliness are important pieces of the marketing puzzle. In fact, research indicates that personalization of messaging can deliver 5 to 8 times more ROI and increase sales by up to 10% or more. Google Trends can help you send the right message to your target market at precisely the right time. Embracing the power of Big Data can make this seemingly impossible task possible.
- Tracking Marketing ROI – Before Big Data’s existence, it was impossible to quantify the ROI of a single social media post or blog article when it came to marketing reach and revenue generation. Big Data now makes it easy to track the success of blog posts or social media posts through things like page views, likes, shares, Retweets, +1’s and sales generated. If something is popular, you’ve clearly touched on something that is important to your target audience. If there’s zero engagement or very few sales, it’s is a pretty clear indicator that something is wrong and your strategy should be modified accordingly.
Recent reports indicate that by harnessing the power of Big Data in postcard marketing campaigns, many businesses are experiencing increases in lead generation of up to 50% – AND at a cost that’s about 33% less. And the best part is that many digital printers make it super easy to integrate Big Data into your direct mail marketing campaigns.
If generating more leads at a lower price-point is music to your ears, give us a jingle today at 866-319-7109 or at okiam@prospectsplus.com to learn more about how we can help you improve the ROI of your postcard marketing efforts simply by embracing the power of Big Data.