10 Tools Helping Companies Manage Big Marketing Data Big data has become central to developing the best marketing strategy.
By Deep Patel •
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
One of the latest trends in the business world is big data -- after all, analyzing big data is a highly effective way to develop effective marketing and sales strategies. It's extremely useful, as it includes massive amounts of information collected on customers from everything from email marketing campaigns to web analytics.
Due to the vastness of information available, however, it can get difficult for marketers to aggregate and analyze it all in an efficient way. Luckily, there are many tools out there to help companies manage big marketing data. Here are ten of the best:
1. Improvado.io
In 2014, 60 percent of business professionals reported pressure from upper management to be more data-driven -- especially marketers. Improvado.io's solution aggregates marketing data from 50+ API integrations in one place, without developers.
By simply connecting to the platform, you can view social, search, display marketing data through Improvado.io's widget based dashboard or automatically push the data into any third-party business intelligence tool, like Google Data Studio or Tableau, for example.
Related: 'Big Data' Is No Longer Enough: It's Now All About 'Fast Data'
2. Mixpanel
Thirtythree percent of elite marketers say that having the right technologies for data collection and analysis is the most useful in understanding customers; apparently, the designers of Mixpanel agree.
This tool tracks comprehensive user behavior, which lets organizations see what their potential customers are doing on their websites. Mixpanel organizes the data for you, allowing you to see patterns in web usage to help inform future marketing strategies.
Related: How Big Data Analytics Is Solving Big Advertiser Problems
3. Skytree
Skytree provides users with important analytics on customer segmentation, fraud detection, churn prediction and more. Further, it accepts and analyzes data streams for everything from relational databases to machine learning libraries, which would be extremely helpful for the 39 percent of marketers who say that their data is collected "too infrequently or not real-time enough."
Related: Why You Need to Embrace the Big Data Trend in HR
4. Karmasphere
It's predicted that there will be between 140,000 and 190,000 too few people with the analytical skills necessary for big data jobs by 2018. This means that the few big data experts will be expensive to employ, so it's important that you're able to work with big data yourself. Karmasphere allows users to organize their big data analytics on Hadoop, making the somewhat-complicated software a lot easier for the common person to manipulate.
5. Jaspersoft
The volume of business data worldwide doubles every 1.2 years, requiring companies to continuously manage increasing amounts of data to stay on top of it all. Jaspersoft covers a huge range of services from online analytical processing to data integration and visualization, making managing that much information a breeze.
Related: The Big Deal About Big Data for Small Business
6. Talend
Talend's Master Data Management offering is a great tool for integrating real-time data and applications while making sure all of the data is high-quality. Poor data quality costs U.S. businesses $600 billion a year, so taking some preventative measures like using Talend's data-cleaning services can save you a lot of trouble further down the road.
7. Apache Hadoop
With 2.7 zettabytes of data existing in the digital universe today, organizations need somewhere to store it. This is where Hadoop comes in: this tool provides massive amounts of storage for any kind of data, packs a punch with its processing power, and can manage several concurrent jobs. Even better, Hadoop is an open-source software framework, which means you can scale your data up and down without worrying about any hardware failures.
Related: Why Entrepreneurs Should Look Beyond Big Data
8. Marketing Evolution
Marketing Evolution aids marketers in creating ROI plans using big data -- given the fact that 29 percent of respondents report that their marketing departments have "too little or no customer/consumer data," this is filling a significant need. In essence, this tool helps users figure out the "right" data to analyze, helping them dial into that precious consumer information. Even better, it helps users figure out in real-time which marketing pushes work best with different types of people and situations.
9. OpenRefine
OpenRefine is another open source tool that quickly and easily explores huge data sets -- even when the data quality is relatively poor. Since poor data can cost businesses 20 to 35 percent of their operating revenue, this is especially important for companies keeping an eye on their bottom line. Its user-friendliness also helps, as beginners can still clean up data sets for effective use.
Related: With Whole Foods Purchase, Amazon Just Bought a Playground for Big Data
10. Kapost's Content Scoring
Finally, Kapost's Content Scoring uses big marketing data to help users determine how much revenue individual pieces of content make. Only 16.6 percent of marketers use marketing analytics to inform multi-channel marketing, which means this tool can help your business get ahead of the competition.
In our technologically-advanced world, big data is becoming the name of the game in developing marketing strategies. These tools can help your organization leverage big data to boost your own campaigns.
