Your creative team followed data-driven marketing strategy to a T. They collected engagement metrics from your social media platforms, gathered behavioral and demographic facts through your website, elicited contact information via landing pages, measured click-through rates from emails, filed away customer feedback thanks to chatbots – and now, your brand is sitting on a mountain of raw data that means absolutely nothing.
If this story hits eerily close to home, you’re not alone:
Data-driven marketing is one of the most critical components of any brand’s success, but once stacks and stacks of customer details are collected, how do you sort and analyze it all? With more data available to marketers than ever before, the brands who will succeed are the ones who know how to utilize it…and that’s precisely where data lakes come into play.
As disheartening as it is to recognize that 95% of businesses are drowning in under-utilized data, companies that do understand how to use their data-driven marketing results can gain an equally astounding 89% improvement in customer acquisition and retention. Join (human)x as we dive deep (yes, quite literally) into data lakes and uncover how these infinite pools of possibility can offer your brand a cost-effective, flexible, and scalable solution for storing and managing huge amounts of raw, structured, and unstructured data.
What Are Data Lakes?
First coined in 2011 by James Dixon, Chief Technology Officer of Pentaho, data lakes are massive data systems that can store, manage, and analyze huge quantities of unorganized information, including:
Data lakes are nothing new, but with the explosion of AI and machine learning, the benefits of data lakes in marketing are suddenly taking center stage. In the words of (human)x Senior Consultant Clark Frye, these massive wells of data can “allow us to store raw data in its native format, which means we can analyze it in ways that weren’t possible before. This approach has been really effective in uncovering insights that help clients stay competitive.”
Data Lakes vs. Data Silos vs. Data Warehouses: What's the Difference?
With so many methods available to store data, it’s easy to assume that your current system is as good as it gets. You might be pleasantly surprised, however, to find out that transitioning from a data silo or warehouse to a data lake can increase your business’s performance and profitability in shocking new ways.
All three systems are centralized data repositories, though data lakes are the most agile and least expensive. To help you decipher which cloud storage system you’re using now and the how data lakes could elevate your marketing, here’s a quick overview of each filing method:
Common-Use Cases for Data Lakes
The explosion of unstructured data, including IoT and social media, ultimately led to the development of data lakes, but their use in the marketing sphere really gained wings as advancements in cloud computing and storage made data lakes more accessible and scalable. If you, like many of our (human)x clients, are curious about the benefits of data lakes in marketing, we put together this snapshot of their value add for your business:
- Data lakes provide the foundation for advanced analytics, AI, and machine learning. This fact is particularly important to marketers who regularly need to store and analyze large amounts of consumer data, sort it into manageable categories, and leverage it to predict purchasing behavior.
- Marketers can use data lakes to access real-time customer segmentation, predictive analytics, and personalized campaigns to improve marketing strategies and ROI. Data lake information can be used to feed artificial intelligence models and develop even more detailed consumer journeys and personas, which only serves to enhance campaign outputs and profits.
When Are Data Lakes Most Beneficial?
Businesses in nearly every industry could harness the benefits of data lakes in marketing. They lead to improved customer segmentation, give brands the ability to develop personalized campaigns at a large scale, provide input for machine learning models that can predict consumer behavior, are more cost-efficient than traditional storage methods, and provide real-time feedback and access to vital data like ad performance and customer response. Our very own Senior Consultant Clark Frye wisely pointed out this data lakes usage scenario:
“For instance, one client wanted to combine structured sales data with unstructured customer feedback from social media. By leveraging a data lake, they were able to bring these different data types together. This enabled the team to identify patterns in customer behavior and market trends that were previously hard to access.”
Everyone from podcasters and streaming services could use them to improve recommendations and subsequently sell more ads. Omnichannel retailers could collect data from multiple touchpoints within their ecosystems like social media, websites, and brick-and-mortar stores, then rely on data lakes to store and analyze this invaluable information to inform future consumer interactions.
How Marketers Can Harness the Power of Data Lakes
Data lakes platforms are on the rise, and we wholeheartedly believe they will continue to enhance customer data platforms and help marketers make better data-driven decisions. With this in mind, testing out data lakes’ capabilities could be an attainable next step for your brand. Services like Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure Data Lake, and Google Cloud Storage are all cloud-based data lakes that store, process, and analyze vast amounts of data.
The trouble is, implementing a data lake on your own can bring a variety of challenges – and that’s coming from our very experienced (human)x team. As Clark Frye observed,
“Proper data governance and security measures are crucial to ensure the data lake doesn’t become a data swamp. Open communication and careful planning are essential. My biggest piece of advice to clients is to start by identifying what data they have and what insights they’re hoping to gain. Being transparent about your goals helps in setting up a data lake that truly adds value.”
One fact we know for sure is that data lakes will continue to shape the future of marketing, and the brands who learn how to utilize them will succeed in a competitive landscape. The experts at (human)x can help you get started using data lakes to discover deeper human insights that will make your brand matter more and succeed. Contact us today to learn how your business can start utilizing data lakes to stay ahead in the competitive digital marketing landscape.
