The importance of Real-Time Analytics

Over the last year, we have received increasing numbers of requests from our clients for us to find them candidates who have experience working with real-time data, as they are beginning to realize the immediate and significant benefits of understanding customer journeys and the effects that has on product performance and sales in general.

So, why is this important in a marketing analytics environment and why aren’t more companies employing the use of real time analytics in their customer engagement strategies?

From what I see within the market I operate in as a recruiter, and from some additional research, SMEs and start-ups don’t necessarily have the infrastructure in place to handle the large capacity of real-time data they amass, and larger companies that do; simply do not know enough about real-time processing to want to implement it or invest.

Key Drivers

There is nothing more valuable to a marketing analyst then knowing what your customer is thinking in real-time as they make buying decisions:

• How a product is performing? engagement strategies?
• Who is buying it?
• What is the demographic of visitors to your website?

The ability to have access to accurate information at your fingertips, allows marketers to make an immediate decision as to how to utilize their data whether it be to target, segment or communicate with customers based on their buying persona.

Amazon is a prime example of how well this can work within a business, with the use of recommendation models both onsite and through direct marketing resulting in a 29% sales increase in the second quarter of this fiscal year. The integration of a real-time analytics framework has evidently been a highly successful tool for them, and surprisingly their customer engagement increased the most through the use of direct marketing as opposed to onsite. As a result of their success, real-time data has driven the advertising approach for Amazon.

Eliminating Barriers

It’s easy for SMEs to believe that cost and a lack of resources will prevent them achieving similar results, but this approach can help any size business within any industry/sector. There are plenty of cloud based solutions (including a couple offered by Amazon) that should be explored by businesses and can easily remove infrastructure barriers and allow you to utilize your rich data. Not only will these insights direct you as to how much you should spend on customer communications, but which channels are most effective, and should in turn increase your ROI.

It would be great to hear your experiences of using real-time data and the effects it has had your teams or businesses. Where do you see it developing within the market?

From a recruitment perspective, real-time analytics is a rapidly growing requirement, and we are seeing an upward trend in the demand for experienced analysts to have exposure to real-time tools such as AWS, MongoDB, Hadoop or Redshift etc. Real-time analytics is here to stay and will dominate the future of how companies across any industry communicate with their customers.

	Jenni Kavanagh