We are inching closer and closer to an impending revolution in the field of marketing, and the primary driving force behind this revolution is IoT or the “Internet of things.”
Conventional marketing tactics are becoming increasingly futile nowadays.
That’s because the only thing that appeals to today’s customer is marketing content that is highly relevant to his needs and that is provided to him exactly when he requires it.
This is exactly why marketing elements like Personalization, Artificial intelligence, marketing automation, etc are being touted as the most dominant trends of the future.
The unique prowess IOT holds is that, if integrated with these marketing trends, it has the potential to exactly provide what today’s customer needs.
In other words, IoT has a huge potential to enhance the overall customer experience that you are offering if you can smartly integrate your marketing strategy with it.
Let’s look at three such ways in which IOT can revolutionize marketing in the future years to come.
- Enabling real-time Contextual marketing:
Contextual marketing refers to targeting a customer with marketing content based on his user identity and the type of content searched by him.
There is a strong reason why contextual marketing is being regarded as the future as well as the saviour to the marketing industry.
That’s because it strictly follows the concept of Personalization at its core when it comes to creating and marketing content.
So how can IOT skyrocket the scope of contextual marketing?
In addition to providing personalized content, there is something else that makes contextual marketing so unique.
That is, its ability to provide real personal content on a real-time basis.
This is where IoT comes in
Iot development in recent years has produced devices like smart sensors and edge-based processing platforms that can collect and analyze customer data at the same time and provide the customer with real-time solutions based on their specific situations and demands.
Let’s simplify this with an example:
Let’s say your car freshener is on the verge of running out, in this situation, if your car is connected to an IoT based device, you would immediately get a notification on your Smartphone, about the same, and along with that you would also be shown certain car fresheners, that you can purchase from various e-commerce stores.
- Increasing the scope of Personalization:
The Pre- IoT era saw marketers offering personalized content primarily based on their customer’s browsing patterns.
Inevitably, personalized marketing had to bear a much-diminished scope that was strictly limited to only when a user was browsing the web for a particular product.
The manner in which IoT can enhance personalization is that it can make it feasible for marketers to target their customers, even when they are not actively browsing the internet.
A customer’s location and his behavioral aspects regarding a particular product/service or goal are the two aspects that IOT based devices would be considering for this.
Here is a real-life example of how fitness wearable companies like Fitbit might leverage IoT in the future.
Let’s say a customer is using a fitness wearable device to track his daily calorie consumption and calorie burn.
As a primary goal, he has stated: “Fat loss” in his respective fitness app.
In this situation, an IOT based device would use the information from the fitness wearable and proximity data through beacons, and finally, deliver notifications on e-mails of the nearest affiliated fitness supplement stores that are operating near his location and also suggest purchasing specific supplements related to his goal, like fat cutters or whey protein.
- Integration with marketing automation:
Marketing automation is the tool that would drive both context-based as well as personalized marketing in the future, and enhance their effectiveness.
Other than this, integrating marketing automation and IoT would primarily lead to the following two benefits:
- Enhancing behavioral data collection:
Potential integration of IoT and marketing automation would enhance the spectrum of behavioral data that marketers use to collect earlier.
IoT can enable customer data being collected from sources such as home appliances, automobiles etc, and this, in turn, can be used by automation devices or a firm’s marketing automation software for more detailed segmentation and personalization of their customer database.
For example, Customer data can be gathered on washing machine usage patterns of different customers based on certain aspects such as “frequency,” “duration,” “mode selected” etc and personalized coupons on washing powders and maintenance services can be sent accordingly based on these bifurcations.
Alert based notifications:
This is something that is going to be huge stride in the field of overall customer experience enhancement, and if achieved successfully, would also help a firm in establishing a strong emotional resonance with their customers.
Customer usage data can be used to provide real-time alerts when it comes to home appliances or automobiles.
For example, notifying a customer when his printer’s ink needs to be refilled, or when his car is due for an oil change.
In both the above scenarios, marketers can either send discount coupons or inform the customer about the nearest shops or service stations where they can avail such a product or service.
Concluding…
There’s no doubt that IoT is the next big thing that will drive new-age marketing tactics in order to satisfy a more evolved and demanding consumer.
Therefore it’s high time that businesses and marketers start extensive research on how they can exclusively leverage IoT is their marketing tactics.
The more quickly they can adapt IoT is their marketing models, the faster they would be able to scale the feat of personalized and real-time value offering for their customers.
Author Bio- Hi There, I am Shaun Williams, a content writer with Goodfirms, a research platform for DevOps and Game Development companies, among many others. I enjoy communicating ideas and knowledge creatively and also ensure that the readers never suffer from boredom while reading my posts.
