The customer data that companies collect from websites, social media, blogs, digital advertising and mobile is exploding. And as big data gets bigger, the amount of untapped insights available from analyzing that day is also growing exponentially. Marketers covet those insights as a way to better understand and engage with their customers and ultimately drive revenue—but how do they get to it?
According to Gartner, organization that successfully integrate high-value, diverse new information types and sources into a coherent information management infrastructure will outperform their industry peers financially by more than 20 percent.* Fortunately, a new solution that combines Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) with the expertise of eSage Group allows marketing professionals to extract value from Big Data, quickly and with relative ease.
We interviewed eSage’s Dean Bedard, COO, about how the combination helps marketers unleash the power of Big Data and put it to use:
Q. Why is eSage Group’s solution for mining big data important to marketing professionals?
Dean: Marketing organizations need a robust solution that can provide actionable customer and campaign insights from the large amounts of structured and unstructured data they collect. These insights can be used to create better-targeted cross-channel campaigns and provide timely information to help tune marketing campaigns as they’re running. For example, a certain percentage of the original investment might be dispersed differently between digital advertising and social outreach at a certain point during the campaign, and big data can lend insight into what split will be most effective.
Q. How are eSage and Hortonworks working together to enable this insight?
Dean: eSage and Hortonworks are unleashing the potential of big data in a matter of weeks with a flexible solution that provides marketers a level of unlimited detailed cross-channel analysis that they previous didn’t have. HDP provides a big data foundation to efficiently store and process all this data, while eSage Group helps extract business intelligence through a combination of user friendly analysis technology, deep understanding of marketing analytics and business-focused delivery methodologies. This combination of technology and process provides a robust, flexible and extremely efficient solution that allows rapid development of rich and powerful analytics.
Q. How do the two platforms interact?
Dean: eSage Group’s Enterprise Marketing Platform includes connectors to HDP that enable rapid extraction of the most valuable marketing data. Once the data is within the eSage platform, logic can be implemented for powerful cross-channel analytics and key performance indicators. With this layer of intelligence in place, marketers can begin to make sense of data and gain the kind of insight they need to support and shape their efforts.
Q. Marketers typically aren’t very technical. Can they still use the platform?
Dean: Certainly. eSage Group provides marketers with access to Technical Business Analysts that understand the technology, as well as the business needs. The Analysts can help Marketing personnel identify what goals to measure, how to measure them and what data is required, then work with IT to obtain that data and get it into user friendly analysis tools. eSage enables data access and analysis using the business tools marketers are already familiar with, such as Microsoft Excel, PowerPivot for Excel and PowerView for SharePoint.
Q. So, the solution bridges the gap between enterprise data and marketing?
Dean: Absolutely! Hortonworks can collect and process terabytes, even petabytes of both structured and unstructured data very cost-effectively. With eSage Group’s intelligence laid on top of the platform, marketers can now extract and analyze this information in a very cost-effective and rapid manner.
Conclusion
It’s clear that big data offers huge potential for marketing organizations that can uncover customer and campaign insights from the large volumes of structured and unstructured data they are collecting. Together, Hortonworks and eSage Group are helping marketing organizations to realize this value quickly and with relative ease.
For more information about how eSage Group and Hortonworks are partnering to make key information available to marketing organizations, please visit eSagegroup.com. You can also follow eSage Group on Twitter (@eSageGroup) or by reading their blog.
~ Lisa Sensmeier
*Gartner, July 2012
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