4 Marketing Data Predictions for 2014

Big data was one of the main buzzwords in 2013, and in all likelihood, it will remain in the spotlight throughout 2014 as well. However, the market space has changed a bit as companies started to realize that data on its own will have no impact on the scale of one’s business.
The secret is being able to use this data effectively and find an actual way of translating it into revenues.
So what are the data-related predictions for 2014? Let’s start with these:
Data Coming to Retail
Machine-learning technologies like data gathering and analysis are becoming more popular in many industries and types of businesses. Yet retail as a whole hasn’t made any significant moves to make data an important part of their operations.
But this is changing now, and it’s said that retail companies have started to expand their recruiting process to find skilled professionals in the data analytics space. This should make it easier for them to take advantage of the new technologies out there.
What does this mean to us? Gathering and analyzing data about your retail customers does work and has great potential for future profits. Every affiliate should take this into account when setting up new tracking mechanisms.
Multichannel Doesn’t Matter
“Multichannel” was one of the marketing buzzwords of 2013. But as it turns out, customers don’t care about multichannel. More than that, hardly anyone knows what multichannel even means.
Customers do care, however, about one thing and one thing only. They want to have a seamless experience when shopping online or signing up to new services and tools.
This means that it’s our job to connect various channels of our operations together so they create one big (and sensible) picture.
Become Fluent in Data Analytics
In 2014, marketing will be extremely data-driven. There’s no more room for guessing or making decisions just because “you feel like this is going to work.”
The more fluent you become in data analytics, the more targeted and better your decisions will be. And this goes far and wide. Every website tweak, every new product or promotion, every new marketing method implementation can be improved by analyzing existing data.
Mind the Millennials
The Millennials is the most studied generation today. Basically, everyone born between 1980 and 2000 is considered a Millennial.
Why is this generation different? It’s the first generation that truly adapted the new technological findings into their everyday lives.
A study shows that American Millennials spend $600 billion annually and that by 2020, it’s going to be $1.4 trillion.
What this means is that anyone who fails to gather relevant data about this generation and then make educated decisions based on this data, will fail.
Those are (only) predictions. To be frank, we can never know for sure what’s going to happen in the next 12 months, but the above gives us a good idea on what’s worth paying attention to.