Big data analytics – where businesses examine large amounts of data to learn more about the way they operate – represent a huge opportunity for all marketers.

In a complex market, with customers diverted down various channels to arrive at your product, it’s important to be able to gain a bigger picture of how you are performing. It will come as no surprise that, according to Forbes, businesses using analytics are also the ones that tend to grow fastest. The applications these new analysis methods have to marketing are innumerable.

Marketing businesses can answer questions that decades ago organisations could only have dreamed of answering. For the first time, it is possible to produce objective, solid statistical data on how effective different marketing initiatives are performing at this moment in time and predict how they will perform in the future.

If your business is trialling an email marketing strategy or attempting a different form of content marketing, it is possible to apply data analytics to gauge the campaign’s success. Kissmetrics, for example, allows marketers to gain a better insight into where they’re gaining and losing customers, while Google Analytics can be utilised to provide information regarding which areas of a site are performing strongly, and which need improving. Marketers can act according to the information revealed, and develop a strategy that works for them and their business, or clients.

Analytics provides marketing specialists with the opportunity to not just gauge the success of a new campaign on the evidence created by the last one. Instead they can analyse the exact share of the market they have in specific places and among certain age groups.

In the past, a business would say ‘our product occupies 60% of the current market’, but once big data analysis is applied to this finding, it may be possible to see that the product actually occupies 80% in one region, but less than 30% in another. It is these precise pieces of data that can change the fortunes of a marketing strategy – and it would be foolish not to use them.