Every single keystroke that you make can provide marketing data. Every single search you initiate on your phone can serve as a future piece of information that marketers use to connect you with the products that they think you will like the most. From name matching software to semantic extraction software engines, today’s marketing and advertising world makes use of a number of platforms to make sure that they reach the customers who they think should be the most interested in their products and services.
We live in a digital world, and it should come as no surprise that the electronics that we use keep us connected to the vendors who think they can predict our future purchases. When you search for the closest Mexican restaurant, for instance, semantic links also push notifications for area stores and events that you might also be interested in. And given that so many of your purchases are also a part of your digital footprint, many of these notifications are fairly accurate because of the advanced techniques that can provide the matching of names, locations, and other data.
Known as the process of converting unstructured text data into meaningful data for analysis, text analytics can help measure customer opinions, product reviews, and feedback. In addition, sentiment analysis and entity extraction also help support fact based decision making. Often used by corporations that are analyzing customer data, as well as security and government agencies researching people, text analytics is a growing industry. For while many of us think that marketing companies already know a lot about us, the fact of the matter is that the International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that less than 1% of this digital data is ever analyzed. Text mining and text analytics, however, is the industry that is set to bridge the gap to the missing 99%.
The latest research, in fact, predicts that while the current value of the text analytic market is at an estimated $3 billion today, it is forecasted to double and reach as high as $6 billion by the year 2020. Not surprising then this is a field that will continue to not only influence the individual purchasing decisions that consumers make, but the nation’s entire economy as well.
The matching of names, locations, and searches is a booming business that will continue to depend on the mining of the data that so many of us broadcast to the world every time that we go online and conduct a search. With continued improvements in software that specializes matching of names, locations, and other data, digital marketing will continue to have a major influence in every consumer’s life.