The Internet of Things (IoT) is omnipresent and always-on communication, carrying out functions that both impact and reflect our physical world. For marketers, the way in which Internet connectivity has spread to include formerly-analog everyday objects presents an exciting array of new opportunities.
Now that almost anything—from your watch or your pacemaker to your toaster oven or automobile—can go online, the tectonic plates are beginning to shift beneath the feet of marketers. As the IoT is essentially a wide area network of devices shooting a stream of data up at the cloud, marketing professionals have started to capitalize on the immense scope of potential within this ever-expanding entity.
After all, marketers are no strangers to gathering as much information about their customers as possible in order to analyze, predict, and respond to their changing needs. However, unlike traditional market segmentation, the Internet of Things helps create and enable much richer and complex sets of data.
Using information gathered from a wider array of touchpoints—online, in-store, and via devices and products themselves—the trackable range of customer behavior has expanded exponentially. In other words, rather than wait for the majority of the data to come from the point of sale, marketers can follow their customers throughout their journey, from initial interest to the purchase action and beyond.
Raw data isn’t all the IoT has to offer. The abundance and interconnectivity of digital devices presents a myriad of brand new ways of interacting with the customer, helping you listen and respond to their questions or frustrations almost immediately.
Predictive analytics also gets a massive boost, because with the IoT, consumer marketers (and with the Industrial Internet of Things—the IIoT—B2B marketers) can access information beyond what is possible with programs like SEMrush or Google Analytics. With connected devices, marketing teams can know precisely when and where an individual will eat lunch, attend a concert, or even squeeze in a workout.
The IoT and social media have converged in such a way that an individual’s social profile is embedded in their use of various smart “things.” A wearable device, for example, knows if its owner is sleeping at home or not; if they are home, the coffee might be brewed at 7:00 a.m. and the smart thermostat promptly switched on. The knowledge of these actions and preferences will be attributed to the individual, and communicated back to marketers and other Internet-enabled devices in the loop.
