For CMOs Big Data Can Lead to Big Profits

CMOs are under mounting pressure to show how their budget delivers incremental business value. At the same time, the consumer purchase funnel is generating ever-greater amounts of data that becomes more and more difficult to track as consumers add social media and mobile channels to their decision-making.

The bottom line is that more efficient and effective use of data can pay big dividends for the marketing organization. Companies that are better able to leverage their data have an advantage over their competitors.

This has led marketers to overwhelmingly agree that big data analytics will become a major component of their business over the next several years—according to the Teradata Data Driven Marketing Survey 2013 released by Teradata earlier this year, 71 percent or marketers say they plan to implement big data analytics within the next two years.

Marketers already rely on a number of common and easily accessible forms of data to drive their marketing initiatives—customer service data, customer satisfaction data, digital interaction data and demographic data. But true data-driven marketing takes it to the next level: Marketers need to collect and analyze massive amounts of complicated, unstructured data that combines the traditional data their companies have collected with interaction data (e.g., data pulled from social media), integrating both online and offline data sources to create a single view of their customer.

Visually and McKinsey & Company has put together this infographic designed to illustrate the pressures that CMOs find themselves under and the potential benefit in leveraging big data.

Thor Olavsrud covers IT Security, Big Data, Open Source, Microsoft Tools and Servers for CIO.com. Follow Thor on Twitter @ThorOlavsrud. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline, Facebook, Google + and LinkedIn.