The Role of Big Data in Digital Marketing

Introduction

With the Internet and digital media coming into our lives, the way businesses operate has radically changed. More than 3 billion people in the world regularly use the Internet to search for products, enjoy themselves, and find friends (Chaffey, 2019: 6). Consumers spend a large part of their lives in the digital environment and mostly benefit from it, which causes both consumer behavior and marketing methods of businesses to undergo a major change (Chaffey, 2019: 6). The development in digital technologies causes the marketing activities of businesses, which aim to gain a competitive advantage by meeting the demands and expectations of consumers and by complying with the present conditions, to transform each day. From desktop to laptops to smart phones and tablet devices, there are technological platforms that consumers can easily use. The digital environment offers product, service, and price options of different suppliers to customers, and provides them with a faster and an easier way to buy.

The increasing number of technological tools and the ability to perform operations, which normally require different devices, using a single device in time has enabled new ways of marketing on the Internet. In this way, a new user-centered, more measurable, global, and interactive digital marketing concept has emerged (Piñeiro-Otero and Martínez-Rolán, 2016: 38). Digitalization of almost every aspect of business operations today leads businesses to take action in order to create a sustainable value, increase business performance, and gain competitive advantage by making use of big data and analytical tools (Wamba et al., 2017: 357). With digital transformation, consumers are benefiting from more and more digital tools. All kinds of operations performed by consumers using these tools are registered and stored. Datasets, which are obtained through combination of the data that come from sensors and the Internet of Things and created on web sites, social media, and mobile platforms and the data within the body of operations, have created the “big data” concept (Chen et al, 2014: 321). Big data indicates massive amounts of data that have reached a greater audience thanks to the increasing number of operations performed by consumers in the digital environment. As the volume of the data increased, the marketers started to use not only the traditional operation data, but also advanced statistical modeling techniques developed to analyze the data that are getting more and more complicated, including unstructured data such as images, conversations, pictures, audios, and videos obtained from digital and social media (Erevelles et al, 2016: 898). Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter have a great impact on customer decisions and that’s why the leading businesses and brands endeavor to include information obtained from these platforms into their marketing solutions (Moro et al., 2016: 3344; Amado et al., 2018: 2). The utility of big data enables marketing tools to work in a stronger and a more innovative way (Grishikashvili and Meadows, 2014: 27). Successful businesses regularly analyze their customer service records. Since businesses always monitor the marketing environment, they are able to collect data regarding consumer sensitivity to products and brands.