How the Internet of Things Will Change Marketing
An industry that is expected to add $ 19 trillion to the Global GDP will definitely have an impact on all aspects of an organization. As such the Internet of Things will revolutionize marketing. Within a few years, thanks to the Internet of Things, a marketer’s job will look totally different than today. When products are connected to the Internet, it means that we can start communicating with those products and that opens a whole new world of exciting possibilities for marketers:
Talk to Your Products
Think of the possibilities that are created when brands will track your engagement with their products through the Internet. All of a sudden they have information about how you use when you use them, who uses them etc. Information like how long you sleep and how often you toss and turn or how fast you empty your bottle of beer on a hot summer day can be very interesting for marketers. Already, the list of connected products, from connected toothbrushes to connected toys is enormous. This data will completely change the way brands can interact with their customers and that requires a new approach for your marketing departments.
Develop New Innovative Partnerships
When devices create so much data, it becomes interesting for organizations to partner with other companies to create exciting new campaigns. Think of your car communicating with your Nest thermostat, so that when you are driving your standard route from work to home, your house knows that it should start warming up. Or what about a beer company that creates smart beer bottles that interact with the music and with a club to give visitors a completely new experience when they are on a night out. That adds a lot of value for your customers and it creates exciting new possibilities that were not possible until a few years ago.
Achieve Better Market Insights
For years, manufacturers only knew where their products were bought and only received limited information about who bought the product and/or where/how the product would be used. The Internet of Things radically changes this and offers the marketer a lot of new data to understand their customers, creating detailed customer profiles. Instead of just Point of Sales data, marketers will have access to detailed information on their customers, where they live, who they are, what their preferences are (if they link social media accounts) and, as mentioned above, how they use the product. All this information enables marketers to create truly personalized messages that will have a lot higher conversion rate than today’s generic messages. Of course, the more data marketers want to collect, the better their security and privacy processes and guidelines should be. Having your customer data hacked, can result in a significant backlash.
The Internet of Things is only getting started, but we can already foresee that it will drastically change how brands should interact with their customers and how they should run their marketing department. The future will be an exciting time, with tons of new ways to interact with your customer and offer significant and lasting experiences.
Image: Mangsaab/Shutterstock
Dr Mark van Rijmenam
Dr Mark van Rijmenam is The Digital Speaker. He is a leading strategic futurist who thinks about how technology changes organisations, society and the metaverse. Dr Van Rijmenam is an international innovation keynote speaker, 5x author and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Datafloq and the author of the book on the metaverse: Step into the Metaverse: How the Immersive Internet Will Unlock a Trillion-Dollar Social Economy, detailing what the metaverse is and how organizations and consumers can benefit from the immersive internet. His latest book is Future Visions, which was written in five days in collaboration with AI. Recently, he founded the Futurwise Institute, which focuses on elevating the world’s digital awareness.
