The Importance of Real-Time Data in the Dynamic Business World

As marked by Clive Humby, “Data is the new oil” and with the technology making headway at a bolting speed, data is turning into a marketer’s prized resource. The planning around real-time data has transitioned from being merely important to absolute necessity. Identifying consumer preferences, product management, and responding to consumer trends, real-time data has become highly valuable for businesses.  But as these data sets increases in quantity, speed and complexities by the minute, the pace at which these insights are used is turning to be just as important as the insights themselves. Real-time data empowers brands and businesses to gain deep insights into the performance of their complicated networks.

With 2.5 quintillion bytes of data being created every day, the valuable insights are always going to be the latest and most up to date data. Coming with a limited shelf life even storage of data is an expensive affair. To stay ahead of your business game and competition curve, it is important to focus on real-time data instead of working with old and batch processed datasets.

What is real-time data?

Going with the literal sense, real-time data is data that is instantly available. It is that data which instead of being stored and analysed before dissemination, is delivered immediately, enabling in the moment decisions.

This provides the marketers with the advantage and window to spot trends in real time and make instant modifications to dynamic creatives and campaigns. It also facilitates the brands to be proactive in their customer retention approach and enhance customer experience by responding to the latest, most up-to-date insights. From banking transactions and GPS to social media, mobile devices, etc, data is a virtual part of our everyday lives.

This real-time data is increasingly important in many industries. For instance, Netflix uses the real-time data to ascertain what the customers want to watch next based on what’s popular currently. At the same time, with the availability of real-time data Facebook is in the position to edit and remove fake and abusive content from 4.75 billion posts done on daily basis.

Types of real-time data?

While you now know what real-time data is, there are two types of real-time data, Event data and Stream data. Where event data is self-contained messages that are generated when well-defined conditions arise, Stream data refers to continuous, unbounded data that has no discrete beginning or end. The main difference is that data from an event is discrete, while data from a stream is continuous.

Advantages of real-time data

Develop High-Converting Customer Profiles

Laying hands on to real-time data and insights not only scales up conversions but also amplifies your bottom line by enhancing customer profiles. When the real-time data is merged with the customer data platform, every new behaviour and action is updated automatically. This draws in prospects in real time, initiating the highly targeted buying personas that usher in the lucrative customers.

Improve Campaign Performance

Gaining access to instant data, just after being acquired gives you the leverage to alter and revise the course of the marketing campaigns based on the consumer insights received. The instant data has the potential to intensify campaign’s momentum and boost performance. Opting for batched data would lead to accuracy issues as by the time the insights are delivered the data would have become outdated.

Connect with Customers Across Touchpoints

In this digitalised culture, consumers look for personalised and seamless experiences. With every second the thoughts and desires of consumers change. To grab consumers attention and to engage with them effectively at their preferred touchpoints, brands require real-time data to monitor the changing contexts.

Easily Track Competitors
While real time data helps you maintain a close contact with your consumers, it additionally helps you track your competition. Any tactical and operational changes such as price points, store timings, new launches etc, you will be notified via the real time data to take necessary actions. The insights will guide your further business strategies and navigate you through the changing trends, upscaling overall business growth.

Respond quicker to changes in the operation of key systems

Resorting to real time data, gives the means to the organisation to identify and respond to changes in their systems, thus upgrading the proficiency of their operations.

Make better business decisions

Instant access to real-time data aids organisations to make better decisions. Keeping track of changing needs and wants helps you make quicker decisions, enabling the organisation to make big profits.

Takeaways

We at Market Xcel unfold the magic of analytics, our team of experts optimises brand’s core processes for extracting and developing actionable insights from large datasets. While today’s critical business queries require custom solutions and partners who acknowledge research needs. Our team of advanced survey programmers offer end-to-end data collection services so the brands and businesses can focus on what’s important. We bring data to life with interactive data visualisations tailored to the needs of brands and businesses to make confident decisions using up-to-the-minute insights.

Additionally, through our retail-tech product such as mBill, we try to collect real-time data to generate sales report, determine market share, SKU level, category level, brand performance aiding the brands to make wise decisions. Project Bharat and Bharat Live are another propriety domain under Market Xcel that extracts and develops data and insights from hinterlands.

What are your thoughts on real-time data analytics? Let us know in the comments below.