Big data isn’t strictly for traditional digital marketing campaigns—mobile marketers can take advantage of new avenues of information to better target relevant audiences and turn them into customers.
Marketers have access to a lot more information than they had previously thanks to big data, and this information coming directly from mobile users.
“I think that’s really the major change, you’re not confined to a single channel or a single application, 
website, publisher or collecting information gaining insight into your customers, you now have a lot more info about these customers,” says Francois de Repentegny, regional director with data specialists Gauvas Inc.
What’s new for marketers are the techniques and technologies that make leveraging big data for mobile campaigns possible. Marketers can now more easily construct profiles and images of target customers, visitors or readers much accurately than was previously possible.
But how can big data help deliver messages to customers via mobile? Using big data solutions to find out what mobile apps people are using and how they are using them is one big area to take advantage of.
“If you have a view into the type of mobile applications that your customers are using, the type of content they are viewing or engaging with, you have a much better idea of what that person likes or doesn’t like, and also what kind of intent there might be behind their actions. A lot of that information is valuable for advertisers and a lot of the applications we’ve seen our customers deploy was geared toward having advertisers come on board and deliver timely messages to their customers,” de Repentegny says.
As it currently stands, mobile audiences are responding most to calls to action.
“The number one use that we see, because the information is so precise, has to do mostly with some call to action. It’s not so much for brand awareness—that’s where you see more banner ads on sites that rely primarily on demographics,” de Repentegny says.
Leveraging big data in this way allows marketers to construct a profile for customers that is not just based on demographics, but based on interests and observed behavior.
“If you are a car company that wants to do an ad campaign for a car, you don’t care who’s the demographic, you want that person to be in a car-buying moment in their life. That’s what’s important in that moment. The traditional methods for advertising relies a lot on demographics, but you can now supplement demographics with something a lot more powerful,” de Repentegny says.
This new information can include things such as the websites a person has visited in the past 24 hours, what kind of keywords they have entered in search engines and what kind of application the person uses. When marketing teams dig into this kind of detailed info, they have a much better idea of who the target customer is and what they’re most likely to engage with in terms of content or advertising.
“The data has been floating around for a while, but now we’re coming into a place where people can access it and work with it, which was not previously possible—that’s what’s new from an enablement point of view,” says de Repentegny.
What makes for a successful big mobile campaign fueled by big data? Much of it has to do with the variables that a campaign focuses on in order to identify targets.
“A lot of online marketers are used to this kind of thing, so it’s a natural thing for them to do, like A/B testing. Now there is a much larger array of potential variables to play with,” de Repentegny says.
The recipe for what kind of big data targeting info to focus on is entirely up to the marketer. For example, you might set requirements that target customers must visit a certain category of website in the past 48 hours to be included on a certain list of targets. This type of knowledge allows teams to zoom in on micro-segments of audiences.
“The market is coming around to this. Brokering of mobile customer information, gaining content from customers and the whole notion of opting-in for these kinds of programs is key here,” de Repentegny says.
It’s early in the game for big data in the mobile marketing space, but as it is leveraged more, marketers will be able to compare results versus traditional methods.
“A year from now, I think we’ll be having conversations around definitive performance comparisons or benchmarks for how this type of advertising performs and how it compares to more traditional advertising. This is still the early days for campaigns reaching out to very specific demographics,” de Repentegny says. And with mobile ever increasing in popularity with the public, the future is bright.
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