Big data or SMS marketing?
Recently in Turkey electronic means of marketing have been regulated harshly. However, the demand for sending texts by companies is not broken. One by one, companies are breaking the legislation or finding loop holes to exploit.
The Turkish craze over SMS marketing can seem absurd. After all, the world of marketing is transforming very fast and big data is at the core of it all.
According to Heike Young from Medium.com, we are in a data driven marketing age. Gartner’s prediction in 2012 was that the chief-marketing officer (CMO) would spend more than the chief information officer (CIO) on technology by 2017 — and confirmed that we’re on track. It’s only two years away, but we’re definitely on track.
With dynamic ads, marketers can go beyond types of people to the individual person. We won’t just see four customized landing pages; we’ll see thousands.
In Young’s article, Gartner’s Research Director Marty Kihn comments that every company will start making decisions more like Netflix. Which show will be the next “Orange is the New Black?” The data already knows.
Data will continue to cause great anxiety for marketers. Kihn noted that data is the #1 area of stress and anxiety for today’s digital marketers. Integrating it, visualizing it, and building dashboards with it is keeping marketers awake at night. Sure, data is rows, columns, and labels. But that’s only about 20% of the story. Then, there are IMs, tweets, semi-structured web text, social actions and network graphs. Eighty percent of data, according to Kihn, falls in this category.
Successful marketers invest in analytics. The best marketers don’t invest in the latest, most-hyped technology, but invest in the best analytics. Analytics will actually help produce better results vs. adding to the noise.
Marketing attribution is both the biggest problem and greatest opportunity facing marketers today. Creating a solid attribution and media mix model is the new data frontier.
Media mix are the golden words to understanding the SMS attachment of Turkish CMOs. Looking at the technological progress, we mistakenly suppose that everyone has a smart phone. We also wrongfully assume that everyone can reach 3G or actively use it. Yes, the numbers are going up but actually a small percentage of the Turkish users are still creating complex data. More than 70 percent of the population is heavy SMS users still. In a world of high tech applications, an SMS service called Yemek Guru that only works on SMS platform could reach a 3-million user base within months.
So if you would ask any marketing in Turkey whether they would rather have a working big data solution or a simple SMS marketing toll, they would still want SMS marketing.
That’s why we will never fully get rid of annoying texts in Turkey for the near future. Marketing via SMS still works and it is working more efficiently than complex big data solutions as of today.