Internet of Things (IoT) is fast growing as an effective marketing tool for consumers and businesses around the world.
In a 2015 report on IoT that was published by Strategy Analytics, it was mentioned that nearly 55 percent of the business entities are familiar with the IoT technology and its advantages. The report further says that over 30 percent of businesses over the globe has already utilized IoT in one form or the other, either as an app or as software or hardware. With the right kind of investment in IoT technology, it can be an indispensable marketing tool.
What is IoT Marketing?
IoT has been instrumental to bring about a change in marketing ideas. There are three main areas where IoT is used for marketing, or can be used. They are: e-commerce, customer channeling and big data.
IoT can be used as a good advertising tool as it generates a lot of high quality, specific data pertaining to individual customers. It keeps a record of the previous purchases of the customers and their preferences.
While there is a limitation of sorts on how individuals might respond to an advertisement, nevertheless, it is something that has a deep impact as it can track customer purchase behaviours online and offline.
How it works?
The main place where IoT can work is advertisement placements. The main purpose of an advertisement is to inform, educate, and entice a prospective customer to purchase a particular service or a product. With IoT this same practice can be taken a bit further. Customers can be contacted to help them guide on how the products can be used as well as market products and services related to their previous purchases.
For instance, in the e-commerce sector, it can target individuals using a particular brand by offering them customer service. Big data is something that is going on increasing its presence in the modern world, from e-commerce to service and hospitality and manufacturing sectors.
IoT can be used to create a huge cache of big data for marketers and that provides for a huge list of customer interactions along with essential data mining of the customers to take their interests and routines into account. So what it does provide is an exponential increase in consumer data. It just goes to show that in the coming years it will become a dominant force as a value-added tool for online marketing where it will generate additional data.
How it can be used?
In the coming years, there will be heavy emphasis on UX (involving voice and touch gestures) while designing IoT devices for data usage. It will be easier to work on IoT that is based on UX systems, since one of the primary usages of IoT in the digital marketing space is that of data gathering. Newer devices will work to provide data that was previously thought to be difficult to be mined.
In order to create the correct UX, designers will need to understand the usage of the data and turn it into useful information for the user. It will also be important to ensure that the system works perfectly and secure the data collected. In short, to get the IoT system implemented successfully, designers have to provide results that simplify all the data and the end user’s choices.
For more information on IoT and its various applications and possibilities, send an email to itsolutions@milestone.tech.
