In the new-age business ecosystem wherein the scale of competition has raised tremendously, Sales & Marketing functions have acquired unprecedented importance. Contemporary technological concepts such as Big Data have indeed served as savior by assisting in the critical and complex decision-making tasks. An associate data scientist, Shubham Agarwal at ATCS explains on why IoT is gaining prominence in digital world.
Further propagating the increased implementation of big data in today’s business environment is the concept of Internet of Things, popularly referred as ‘IoT’.
IoT gained prominence with merging of physical world and the digital world through usage of sensors that eventually enable stakeholders to explore in-depth purchase preferences and make business intelligence sense these parameters that otherwise weren’t feasible to measure or analyze. Smart wearable devices are a befitting example of this phenomenon. In effect, IoT could be defined as a technology that establishes a way for multiple devices to exchange information across network automatically.
Considering the previously cited example of smart wearable devices, the accessibility of such inventions has resulted in users being able to measure or assess personalized data such as the number of calories burnt and sleeping pattern to gather meaningful insights of their fitness regime. From a Sales & Marketing perspective, such informational inputs can be leveraged to pitch consumers with customized offers based on their respective preferences and requirements, thus resulting in higher probability of successful conversions.
Hence, the immediate benefit arising out of IoT is on two counts – meaningful & constant engagement with customers, and multiplied business for the organization. The potential of IoT is not merely confined to end point of sale; in fact, the relevance spans across the entire life cycle of a product or service initiating at the R&D phase.
Capitalizing on this scenario, IoT is virtually replacing the conventional age-old marketing practices of relying upon enormously budgeted celebrity endorsements or tedious consumer surveys. On most of the occasions, these methods didn’t materialize results immediately. Moreover, these strategies costed a lot of money while the assurance of success was unpredictable.
To accentuate further, some of the salient benefits of IoT are:
Availability of detailed sales data: IoT framework enables marketers to attain insights from the entire consumer buying cycle; straight from the behavior stage to actual sales closure. These insights assist marketers to customize their offerings in compliance to the targeted consumer’s taste, and thus the output is in the form of rise in conversions as well as in likelihood of improved loyalty quotient by constantly being able to closely match client expectations.
Machine Learning and Predictive Analysis: The IoT data archived and analyzed over time can be further leveraged under the purview of Machine Learning, Predictive Analytics or Artificial Intelligence to incorporate a heavy element of automation into the marketing process, including on aspects such as CRM or after-sales support.
The influence of IoT in transforming the digital marketing mandates a noteworthy mention as it empowers marketers to deep dive into the minute details of consumer behavior and target them individually. Data of multiple consumer touch points such as fitness apps, taxi aggregator apps, OTT services, etc., can be collated to derive precise consumer data.
On a larger perspective, the network of information broadens the quality and array of consumer data, thereby pushing companies to visualize the consumer usage and feedback about a specific product or service on a dashboard. This input can undergo consideration for future campaigns and product development in order to enhance various customer experiences. In a BYOD ecosystem comprising of multiple devices, more connected devices reflect more accurate insights. Different service and pricing models derived through these insights can be leveraged further for upsell as well as cross-sell opportunites.
This article is writtend by Shubham Agarwal, an associate data scientist at ATCS
