Finetech hosts Google Forum on how to be successful with Big Data

With over 200 customers in their portfolio and the only authorised ‘Google for Works Partner’, with over 10 Google certified sales and engineering professionals, Finetech has been providing cloud-based solutions such as state-of-the-art Customer Relation Management, Customer Support Management, Leave and Approval Management systems, as easy-to-use organisational solutions. As Google’s local enterprise partner, Finetech harnesses cloud benefits for their customers, from small to medium and large organisations, with proven results that this is the most cost-effective method of deploying IT tools now.

Finetech CEO Clehan Pulle said: “The cloud has allowed businesses of any size to compete on a level playing field. They don’t need upfront capital investments or mission-critical applications. They just need half a day with us and we will have them ready for deployment.”

Demonstrating these possibilities at a series of forums organised by Finetech were Melina Lee, Google Cloud Platform Sales Lead, Southeast Asia and Karthik Rajasekharan, Technical Lead for Google Cloud Platform. 

Big Data has been growing at exponential rates over the years with at least three billion people on the internet at any given time, and 247 billion emails sent on a daily basis. This is just some of the off-the-chart statistics creating web traffic on many online platforms. As such, this is a perfect opportunity for marketers to use Big Data analytics in order to set specific marketing metrics for understanding online customer behaviour. Google has seen and understood this gap between marketers and the effective use of Big Data and has come up with methods to bridge this gap at minimum investment to the user, stated Melina.

She further added that the mobile trend in Sri Lanka, which surpasses the world’s 68% growth in mobile internet, is indicative of the need for cloud data usage. Businesses are slowly moving to the cloud, she explains and this is because it allows them to reduce the overall cost of ownership, and creating economies of scale by passing data on to the vendor. It is optimised, scalable and flexible, allowing you to upgrade to the latest technology while being on the cloud. Finally, being on the cloud leaves the management of infrastructure and operations to the experts so that you can focus on your business. 

Melina then went on to explain the way web traffic is compatible with the cloud and using in-house servers is inefficient when compared to the cloud. How? Because the cloud is on-demand and follows a pay-as-you-use model, and the use of the cloud to manage traffic patterns is very applicable.

Karthik, whose background is in data science, then took over to explain how data mining information could affect actual marketing insights and produce results. What Karthik does is take large amounts of online interaction data of customers and then mining that for people, product and placement interactions. This in other words means that he identifies at what time and at which point, customers would engage with a product or a service in order to understand what influences their decision to buy. 

Karthik believes that although traditional marketing shuns data analytics at times as it is believed to lack the heart in marketing, he has found there is an intersection between creativity and data and we can use it to figure out answers to different marketing questions, which results in very targeted and effective marketing strategies in order to create precise reach to a target group. 

What Google does is by combining such information and organising it, they increase the possibility of asking better questions, mainly by taking different data sources and merging them to derive specific marketing insights. With big data, marketers can now test assumptions on a massive number of data points and derive insights that are typically not possible with regular surveys. This way, it is possible to get data-driven insights to drive your business and help send out the right messages to the right audience.

There are data management platforms, which aggregate data from online, social feeds and in-house transactional data to blend this information to understand answers to marketing questions. For example there is a store that has fitted CCTV cameras that uses machine vision to find out how many customers smile when they leave the store. Karthik explains how for example, teenage girls when accompanied with their mothers would have a lesser spend on fashionable items than when accompanied with their fathers, therefore resulting in the need to target fathers to shop with their teenage daughters. 

Then, data has shown that when cold weather is predicted three product types have a change of behaviour: mainly alcohol and that too is identified as Vodka, and by looking at such insights without over analysing it, the next step would be to run targeted marketing campaigns in order to optimise use of such insights.  

There are many Google tools that can actually serve you well in these areas, some of which are Google Query, Google Analytics and Cloud services. It is important to instrument your data to provide specific results. It’s about all understanding human behaviour in order to adjust marketing campaigns to suit your audience. However these are ground-based insights received from research done on solid data, and businesses who have tried using these marketing insights are seeing a positive turn in their strategies. 

“We have helped numerous customers with such information to facilitate better business for them,” said Pulle. “This series was a great success; as the knowledge gained and the information shared helped customers reinvent their businesses.”