There are few things marketers love more than data.

Data provides a holistic picture of a marketer's audience, and big data allows for prediction and hyper-personalization.

Our seventh installment of the #G2Fireside Twitter chat encompassed big data, how its used in marketing, as well as some SEO trends pertaining to the BERT update. This Twitter chat was made for data-driven marketers.

#G2Fireside: Big data in marketing

Those who contributed to the chat from G2 include:

• Devin Pickell, Content Marketing Specialist (Data analytics)
• Sarah Harenberg, SEO Analyst & Data Scientist

Our #G2Fireside guest contributors include:

• Sara Haslem Davis, VP of Growth at CanIRank
• Matt Bentley, Founder of CanIRank

Let's take a look at some of the insights, starting with our first question about how marketers define big data and what it means to them.

Q1: Why is big data important in marketing?

Matt Bentley, our guest contributor, hits the nail on the head with why a marketer should care more about big data right now.

Alice Corner from Venngage expands on Matt's first point of providing a more nuanced understanding of customers and focusing on user intent.

Diana agrees with both Matt and Alice, saying big data provides deeper context about customers and business opportunities.

Aishwarya summarizes the above insights and mentions how big data can humanize our customers more than we can imagine.

Q2: Tag a company that you think is using big data well

A common theme for our Twitter chats is to look at brands that are high-performing for a particular topic. When it comes to big data, Sara tagged Grammarly, a writing-assistant software powered by artificial intelligence.

Spotify, Hulu, and Netflix are just a few of the popular brands that harness big data for its recommendation engines.

Starbucks uses big data and artificial intelligence to understand customer buying habits and preferences, so it's no wonder why Squadhelp tagged them.

I round out the second question with a less conventional brand, the Houston Astros Major League Baseball organization, and how it used big data analytics to capture a World Series title in 2017. Sports is one of the most trending industries applying big data today, with teams vying for competitive advantages.

Q3: What data management techniques do you use?

Data management is the practice of collecting, validating, storing, and processing data so it can be analyzed correctly. Marketers rely on data management and tools for analyzing data. Sara mentions some of the tools in her stack:

I decided to chime in with some of the leading database management platforms in our category.

Q4: How does a marketing team become more data-driven?

Every marketer should aspire to be data-driven, however, this takes a company-wide cultural approach. Sara says education is key for becoming data-driven:

Data silos reside in many businesses, even they're not aware of it. Centralizing and standardizing this data is imperative to becoming data-driven.

Twenty Two Kittens rounds out the question by saying data-driven cultures come from the top-down.

Q5: How do you keep up with Google algorithm updates?

Google algorithm updates can be maddening, so, we asked around to see how SEOs and big data marketers feel about them.

Q6: How does the BERT update affect SEOs?

Google's BERT update, one of its largest algorithm updates of all-time, was recently released. Google states its algorithm will focus more on the context of keywords. Here's Matt's breakdown of the update:

Q7: What plans do you have to use big data in your marketing strategies?

For big data to truly be harnessed by more marketers in the future, data science adoption will need to take place. Here's my take on the future of data science, drawing insights from and IBM Quant Crunch study:

Matt validates this claim using job posting data from Indeed.

Bridget explains that automation and the reliance on tools is likely, given the current software trends.

Q8: What is a good background to get into data analysis?

Our final question complements the previous one about the wide data science gap. How can marketers and those interested in being more data-driven do their part? Sara dropped a resource by Regina Hartley and TED.

Matt mentions that Coursera, an online learning portal, has many of the same courses he took at Stanford for free.

Join us every other Thursday!

Huge thanks again to everyone at G2, our guest contributors, and all our Twitter chatters for providing insight in our latest #G2Fireside on big data and marketing.

Next up is Bridget Poetker, who will be discussing everything about networking and putting your best foot forward as a marketer. You're not gonna want to miss what our contributors have to say!