Marketers’ Confidence in Organizational Usage of Big Data Takes a Tumble in 2015

Millward Brown’s 2015 “Getting Digital Right” study has discovered that only 14 percent of today’s marketers are confident in their organization’s use of big data. This is a large decrease from the 39 percent who said the same in 2014.

The researchers of the study believe the decrease can be largely attributed to marketers not knowing how to efficiently leverage internal and third-party data. “2014 brought an influx of data to marketers, but without an instruction manual on how to use it to generate value,” wrote the authors of the report. “2015 will be the year marketers move towards making big data actionable and insightful.”

Despite the lack of confidence, agency marketers (19 percent), brand marketers (13 percent) and media marketers (10 percent) all said that big data is the biggest opportunity they’re being presented with in 2015. In the study, it beat out multiscreen marketing, video optimization and location-based marketing.

Bringing in the Big Data

A report published in March 2015 by ON24, a webinar marketing solution provider, found that 65 percent of marketers say they have just the right amount of data for it to be considered useful.

About 86 percent claim they use data to measure how customers interact with their content. The results show that webcasts deliver the highest quality data to marketers, surpassing both email marketing and social media. However, not all respondents are seeing an ROI from big data or analytics, according to results.

A total of 77 percent said that big data is still just “a promise,” rather than a reality, in terms of analysis and benefits.