“Small Data” Just as Important as “Big Data” when Developing Marketing Strategies


Big Data is a sweeping term for the large-scale analysis of people’s habits and buying trends in the marketing world. An example would be looking through the overall google search trends for a period of time or a certain age group. It allows businesses and marketers to put together some idea of how people might react to certain products or campaigns.

However, Big Data can be a complicated resource to navigate, especially for someone new to the marketing world. More importantly, Big Data doesn’t allow marketers to build a truly personal connection with their audience and cannot easily be used to predict an individual’s wants and needs. It shows the outcome of certain campaigns products and events, but does not necessarily give an analyst the how and why for that outcome.

For that, Small Data is necessary. Small Data is, arguably, a tool that was not readily available to marketers until the advent of things like the smart phone and social media platforms like Facebook. Small Data is a customer’s unique information, their individual interests, habits, and purchases. This kind of information can be easily gleaned from tech devices that have become an inseparable part of daily life like the smart phone and its descendant the smart watch.

Everything from when someone eats lunch, to their physical health can be measured and provide Small Data for marketing companies to use in an effort to reach their target group. For someone just entering the marketing world, taking advantage of the Small Data tools available can be a fantastic way to maximize your efforts and help to provide focus to the ways Big Data is used and analyzed.

Social Media monitoring, website hits, and personal sales numbers, are all excellent ways of measuring Small Data, and leveraging them can be an important part of running a successful business.

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