Michael Michalis, CEO of DigitalMR, discusses how AI-based unstructured data analysis can make marketing strategies more nuanced.

Michael Michalis, CEO of DigitalMR, explains how AI-based unstructured data analysis can make marketing strategies more nuanced;

Data is fundamental to business decisions. A company's ability to gather the right data, interpret it, and act on those insights is often what will determine its level of success. But the amount of data accessible to companies is ever increasing, as are the different kinds of data available. Business data comes in a wide variety of formats, from strictly formed relational databases to your last tweet. All of this data, in all its different formats, can be divided into two main categories: structured data and unstructured data.

Structured Data

The term structured data refers to data that resides in a fixed field within a file or record. Structured data is typically stored in a relational database (RDBMS). It can consist of numbers and text, and sourcing can happen automatically or manually, as long as it's within an RDBMS structure. It depends on the creation of a data model, defining what types of data to include and how to store and process it.

Unstructured Data

Unstructured data is more or less all the data that is not structured. Even though unstructured data may have a native, internal structure, it's not structured in a predefined way. There is no data model; the data is stored in its native format.

Typical examples of unstructured data are rich media, text, social media activity, surveillance imagery, and so on. The amount of unstructured data is much larger than that of structured data.

Structured data (SD), as represented by numbers in tables or closed-ended survey questions, cannot provide the marketing departments of companies with the nuances and subtlety offered by unstructured data (UD). This subtlety is made possible by both the sheer quantity of UD and the variety of forms it can take, ranging from terabytes of text and images on social media platforms to audio and video information. This quantity of UD is continuing to grow. In fact, IDG predicts that 93% of digital data will be unstructured by 2022, so understanding how to exploit it will be a competitive differentiator for any business.

It is everywhere and comprises the vast majority of all data. Firms and companies have access to it in great quantities – but it is often underutilized. In the world of business data, UD is sometimes referred to as "dark" information due to its raw, hidden, and undigested qualities. But such data can be of great use to marketers and performing what has been called "dark analytics"

Advances in AI mean that sales and marketing professionals now have the means to sharpen their strategies by listening directly to the voice of their customers (VoC) and leads.

By employing AI tools and machine learning techniques, huge quantities of unstructured data can be transformed into fodder for improved marketing.

VoC can take on a variety of different forms, including reviews, feedback on products, calls made to customer services, and their expressions of positive, negative, and neutral feelings towards competitor brands. Ever-increasing advances in the field mean that artificial intelligence is capable of using UD to produce an increasingly sophisticated degree of sentiment analysis.

Unstructured Data can also tell marketers how each one feels about a number of topics. This kind of analysis, achieved through social listening tools and fuelled by the rise of unstructured data, ultimately provides a far more sophisticated understanding of a given market, than the traditional and outdated demographic segmentation practices upon which marketers were once reliant.

It is absolutely possible to market to the distinct demographics provided that an organization is ready to leap into the "dark analytics" of UD. With AI lighting up the darkness and social listening tools ready to detect the gold nuggets of customer feedback, marketers might just find – glinting in the unexplored trove of UD – that there's treasure shining in the shadows, waiting to be claimed.