51% of global marketers predict IoT will revolutionize the marketing landscape by 2024. As a result, market research, direct marketing, and business development task are likely to be impacted by the growing proliferation of connected devices.
Here is a look at IoT's market research opportunities, challenges, and some myths about leveraging IoT ecosystems to understand and keep track of target markets.
Taking data-driven marketing to new levels
IoT creates unprecedented volumes of market data. The age of the hyperconnected customer has arrived, and herein lies both an opportunity and challenge for market research teams everywhere. First, there is the chance to penetrate more delicate layers of the target market to gain a deeper understanding of customer behaviors and motives and amass information on new or broad markets to find people, countries, and communities that may likely be product or service users.
At the same time, the vast volumes of data IoT pose the issue of converting data into productive marketing actions. Customers today are connected to the internet at every touchpoint in the purchase journey, providing an incredible amount of ‘fodder’ for research teams. As IBM notes, making sense of IoT data is imperative for value creation, requiring businesses to apply data analytics solutions that identify patterns, find anomalies, and predict outcomes.
A steady stream of real-time data from connected devices also creates opportunities for marketers and research teams tasked with monitoring patterns and trends in certain markets or among specific audience groups. In addition, this data can inform several business divisions across marketing, sales, customer support, and product development to help bring about improvements, seize opportune moments, or validate existing research findings.
Examples of IoT applications in different industries:
Using iBeacons and geofences to understand how customers move through physical locations, combine with demographic data, transactional information, and purchase history data to send targeted messages via different channels.
The telematics data from vehicles to understand driver behaviors, which insurers can use for policy underwriting and marketing messages.
Streaming analytics in the telecommunications industry to gather data about customer engagement with their networks and using these findings with customer data to make better marketing decisions.
Banks and financial services can use data from mobile apps to determine what kind of new products and services to launch, key market critical targets, and the time to introduce new offerings.
IoT challenges that businesses must overcome
Data collection is an issue businesses must address – cloud services for data collection and analysis, for instance, can remove the challenge of managing a complex infrastructure. However, another challenge is ensuring consumer and customer data is used, keeping their privacy, confidentiality, and security in mind. As a result, businesses need to establish proper data security, information lifecycle management, and other due diligence processes to safeguard this critical asset.
IoT myths to steer clear of
Businesses tend to hold off investing in IoT solutions primarily out of safety concerns. Although privacy, safety, and security are valid issues of IoT adoption, device makers and security vendors prioritize safety and implement robust security measures to make connected devices and IoT systems safe for enterprises and customers.
By itself, IoT cannot promise digital marketing transformation. Instead, businesses must invest in the right artificial intelligence and data analytics tools to make the most of the market information connected devices can collect.
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