Many tech companies claim to have the cleanest, easiest to understand and most illustrative data on the market. But what good is capturing mass amounts of data if you’re not actually benefiting from it? Without action, Big Data just means added server costs, more complex analytics homework, and idle intelligence.

At TagMan, we cast aside the ‘smoke and mirrors’ and describe what data can actually do for online businesses. We help marketers access their data and most importantly, start deriving meaningful insight from it.

So what should marketers be focusing on when it comes to Big Data Buzzwords?

Big Data

Illusion:  For the ‘uninitiated’, Big Data evokes images of rows of screens streaming thousands of lines of code, matrix-style, from which exceptionally intelligent statisticians make instant, complex life-altering decisions.

Reality: The concept of ‘Big Data’ is rather simple. Intelligence determined from sifting through numbers has been in existence essentially since experiments began, the pivotal difference now is that automation has permitted us to analyse a gargantuan amount of numbers at the click of a button and apply it instantly.

The Bottom Line:   For digital marketers, Big Data refers to data on the consumer; who they are, where they’re from, their behaviour online and offline and across devices and their interactions with media on their journey to purchase.   In marketing terms, we’re talking about data sets of any size – small, medium or large – but significance is what we’re striving for in order to make bigger, better decisions.

Clean

The Illusion: Hearing data professionals promote their data stores as ‘clean’ is a common phenomenon in the industry.   Professionals so often proclaim they have ‘clean’ data that this buzzword has lost all of its ACTUAL meaning and value.  Instead of something tangible and real, its overuse and under-explanation makes ‘clean data’ simply an aspirational buzzword.

The Reality:  ‘Clean Data’ is data which has been processed by internal standards to check for regulation and integrity is considered valid. When marketers are searching for answers to a specific question, data which has been processed and sifted of irrelevant fields is considered ‘clean’.

The Bottom Line – For marketers to make ‘Big Data’ informed decisions it is essential that the source data has been checked and verified.  Without ‘clean’ data, marketers are misinformed and misled by duplicate, irrelevant, and inaccurate information.  Find and use systems and data processes that ‘cut the fat’ off your data and give you confidence in the numbers you’re seeing.

Illustrative

The Illusion:   Illustrative data has been sold as a dream.  Reports that make insights so clear that they spell out the changes you must make to your media mix, audience segments, metrics, and other marketing areas, right in the key.  

The Reality:  The excess of channels (social media, ecommerce, search engines etc) pumping out audience data, the practice of analysing accurate data, identifying patterns and determining insight has become more complex than ever.  Illustrative Data possesses the potential to grant marketers a view into the behaviour of their audience.

The Bottom Line – The data sets that we’ve been trying to get our heads around by monitoring click-through patterns and gathering statistically significant demographic data for example, has gotten broader and more dispersed.   Marketers must find a way to connect relevant and correlated data sets through automation, to get truly illustrative data which captures consumer behaviour online and offline, across devices and channels.

Introducing ‘Big Marketing’ from TagMan

Big Marketing is TagMan’s manifesto, not just another buzzword.  Our Tag Management and Marketing Data platform empowers customers, turning smart marketers into Big Marketers

The Reality:  Big Marketing describes the efficient collection, fusion and utilization of Big Data and its sources to drive highly-effective, highly-targeted marketing campaigns and initiatives.  It’s about making media mix decisions based on the most comprehensive consumer journey data, segmentation and targeting based on a multitude of user attributes, and defining metrics based on what matters most to your business.

The Bottom Line – Big Marketing refers to the decisions that data enables marketers to make – that is the pivotal term which defines modern marketing practice – not ‘Big Data’ in its own right.  Big Data is the source; making that data ‘clean’ and ‘illustrative’ allows marketers to analyse the figures, understand their consumers and make big decisions.

TagMan provides its clients with meaningful analysis of data stores and provides them with significant insight; we see ourselves as being the bridge between ‘Big Data’ and marketing to enable ‘Big Marketing’. These data-crunching platforms break down the sheer volumes of data gathered from various marketing channels, by isolating a clean layer of independent marketing campaign data. It is this bridge that makes sense of the data and informs marketers on how they can alter their approach in response to what their target audiences are doing online.

TagMan was thrilled to host an engaging discussion on ‘Big Data,’ moderated by Marketing Week’s Michael Barnett, at Econsultancy’s Digital Cream in London last month.  Marketers representing numerous industries from ecommerce to finance and retail to pharma, gathered to discuss the various challenges and opportunities Big Data presents on a daily basis.

The Cream of the Crop Came to Discuss Big Data at Econsultancy Event

While the discussion was ripe with technical tongue twisters, the overall message was clear. Big Data, and its implications on Big Marketing, remains a mystery for many. Here are few key themes that emerged:

1. Diverse perspectives  Continue reading →

The TagMan Client Services Team

The recent news that Google Affiliate Network is shutting down just after a year in operation doesn’t come as a surprise after complaints about the technology service have been rife in the industry. Online marketing controller of strategy and planning at BSkyB, Helen Southgate was quick to weigh in on the news stating, “clients want more than just tech” – a sentiment shared by TagMan and its customers.

In digital marketing, where major brands rely on software to run their marketing campaigns, determine web performance and improve efficiencies, the difference between good, bad or complete lack of service could mean a significant impact on overall sales. With several Forrester studies confirming that B2B customers still perceive their experiences to be worse than those delivered by bottom-of-the barrel consumer industries such as TV service providers and health insurance plans, why is quality service so seldom seen from today’s SaaS (software-as-a-service) providers? Continue reading →

TagMan, the leading tag management and marketing data platform, has joined forces with FusePump, e-commerce marketing specialists, to form a collaborative partnership to drive additional value and insight into multi-channel marketing.

TagMan’s services enable their e-commerce clients to efficiently manage and unify tag-based technologies to produce one independent stream of clean marketing data from all channels to master the complexities of web analytics, e-commerce and marketing data. FusePump make e-commerce marketing simple for their clients by integrating entire product inventories into online channels such as marketplaces and comparison search engines. Continue reading →