Crowd collecting: How to pull big data into your marketing strategy

The new trend in marketing and branding is to accumulate the maximum amount of information about the customers' preferences and purchasing habits together with personal information, in order to satisfy them to the most and anticipate their wishes.

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The door is now open to unprecedented tools for marketing such as real-time personalisation to buyers or acute identification of the specific content that actually tickles the buyer. Thus, it gives a whole new dimension to the knowledge of consumers, allowing marketers to send the right message at the right time, to found the relevant foundations for successful marketing campaigns, or identify which of the means in place are proving fruitful. But how to leverage this new quantified customer profile? How to translate it into your marketing strategy?

Crowd collecting is offering new alternatives for brands, whether for their product development or to develop their digital offer. Those that have used big data as a foundation to their marketing strategy could see a clear payoff. The means to do so are diverse, ranging from building in-depth analytic tools to fully playing the card of social networks. For example, Avis set the tone of a customer-focused transformation by developing a model called "customer lifetime value". On a very different note, Michelle Phan, make-up brand and YouTube star, collected the feedback of her 8m YouTube subscribers and 3m Facebook likers to design her products and become the most democratic make-up line, made by the people and for the people.

At a time when people are browsing the web or using dedicated apps to look for tutorials or friendly advice, crowd collecting is also the best tool for an entrepreneur to appear as sincere, listening to feedback, and hence get more engagement from its community. The crowd is your best partner for product and service innovation!