Digital marketing in IOT has various significance and practices, leading to a new concept with high functionality and relativity. Smartphones, smart refrigerators, smartwatches, medical sensors, fitness trackers, smart security systems, etc., are few instances of IOT devices.
According to an Insider article, BI Intelligence states that the number of IOT devices has approximately doubled between the years 2014 and 2019. Almost everyone with internet access uses some form of social media or the other. Although IOT seems like a relatively new concept, it has been practiced in various forms throughout the years.
What are Digital Marketing Strategies?
Digital marketing is an element in marketing that uses the internet and network-based digital technologies such as emails, mobile phones, desktops, computers, and other digital media and platforms to advertise products and services. The most popular forms of digital marketing strategies include:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Pay-per-click marketing
Blogging & article writing i.e., content marketing
Email Marketing
Social Media Marketing
Strategies are beneficial to assist businesses and marketing products and services through digital media. Companies and organizations evaluate their campaigns and analyze their strategies and improve upon them. With IOT, existing strategies have been disrupted a lot. The conventional methods of digital marketing strategies seem to have been deranged by the introduction of IOT in modern digital devices.
What is the Internet of Things?
The Internet of Things (IOT) defines any device that has a sensor and an active Internet connection. IOT devices may also be able to connect to other IOT devices that are compatible. There are innumerable IOT devices in the market now, such as:
Headphones
Smartphones
Wearable devices like smartwatches and Fitbit
Laundry machines
Coffee makers
Enabled vehicles
Lamps
Digital home assistants like Alexa and Google Home
According to Forbes Magazine, Gartner analyst firm estimates that there will be more than 26 billion connected IOT devices this year. These devices will change our day-to-day lives and allow businesses and organizations to create new disruptive business models. However, it is important to understand the impact of IOT in disrupting the current digital marketing landscape and how that will bring upon a new and improved digital transformation strategy.
Impact of IOT on Digital Marketing Strategies
According to Dresner Advisory Service, IOT is regarded as not important to the majority of the industries. The current face of business and marketing intelligence is about to change with the beaming disruption trends of IOT technology. Disruptive digital technologies are paving the way to build a new era of marketing strategies that will make our lives better.
In this new age of information, the use of IOT technology has further advanced and has now been incorporated into our everyday life activities. It is important to understand how the current IoT technologies affect marketing, the risks involved, and the impact of big data in the digital marketing industry.
IOT: Disrupting Digital Marketing
The introduction of IOT devices has changed the way digital devices interact with each other. The increasing number of devices has not only impacted our day to day lives, but also the industries and how they operate.
The digital marketing industry will use this opportunity to devise a newer and improved digital marketing strategy to exploit the features of IOT technology to adapt to the industry-wide changes. To best utilize the disruptive business model, marketing strategists should understand how IoT affects digital marketing strategies and use the digital transformation to their advantage.
1. Big Data and its impact
IOT technology brings with itself access to a wider range of information in a bigger network of devices and systems. From a digital marketing standpoint, this can be very helpful in analyzing the entire marketing feed for a product or service. These data can carve out the journey of a customer from the beginning till the end.
Big data is extremely large data sets that may be analyzed computationally to determine patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to customer behavior and interactions in this case.
The Internet of Things generates a lot of data from people. This data facilitates digital marketers to access this data to understand and reach their potential customers. It also allows marketers a better customer understanding and an opportunity to improve existing marketing strategies. Digital marketers will have the opportunity to utilize this data for their benefit by analyzing and devising a strategy. With more and more data, digital marketers will better understand customer behavior and patterns, therefore will improve the digital marketing strategies.
The enormous data poses many issues as well. Storing, handling, and analyzing so much data is difficult, expensive, and time-consuming. Also, it poses difficulties with security. The use of consumer data shoots privacy concerns. The data gathered needs to be secured to prevent the feeling of intrusion by the customer.
General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR) ensures that organizations have strict guidelines on how customer data will be stored, released, and accessed safely.
2. Market Research will be more extensive
IoT has allowed market researchers to access more and more data. IoT-enabled devices provide enormous data for researchers to analyze and study. This data helps in marketing and reaching potential buyers efficiently. Bigger data allows extensive research and formulation of new ways to reach and engage customers. This helps to target a relevant audience. IoT enables organizations to see how their product works and forecast future needs.
3. Personalized Marketing Strategies
IoT allows organizations to access information about a customer’s everyday lifestyle. This allows the marketer to analyze the lifestyle trends of potential consumers. Digital marketers can access the data from different IoT devices a user might use which is beneficial to reveal the behavioral pattern of the target audience for a certain product or service. This also facilitates marketers to give the customer a personalized advertisement experience. It empowers the marketers to forecast demand and supply accurately. Marketers can learn buying patterns, influential trends of purchasing and recognize the ideal audience.
Not only does this increase relevance, but also saves time, money, and effort for sending out promotional content to an irrelevant customer.
4. SEO Industry as a part of Digital Marketing
With the new age of IOT devices impacting digital marketing, SEO will experience a major shift in the industry. IOT is changing how human language is processed by devices. The primary shift focuses on the priority of keywords to the use of natural tone. For digital marketers, the shift from keyword-based SEO content to intention-based language will be an important change.
According to Beth Kotz, “search engines strive to understand the intention of the user as opposed to honing in on a keyword.”
This means people specializing in SEO might face issues and drastic shifts in the industry. Search engines use artificial intelligence to evaluate inquiries and provide relevant data/content. This will have a severe impact on existing organic SEO-based marketing strategies.
5.Real-time Communication
Data from IoT networks can be effectively used by digital marketers to target potential customers and avoid irrelevancy. This includes showing relevant advertisements, providing offers to potential leads, and approaching customers with interest. Marketers can use the data and do data-based marketing to suit the customer and avoid irrelevancy.
IoT allows marketers to build a consumer relationship via feedback, product improvement, and understanding consumer needs. Real-time feedback by the customer is valuable for the product/ service development and its enhancement. IoT allows digital marketing to take a new turn to improvise communication between the customer and service provider. These real-time communication facilities will be greatly utilized by digital marketers to get more traffic into businesses.
6. Maximize Social Media Benefits
IOT devices are mostly used to access various social media platforms, which means the data for those interactions are included in the data from IOT. Digital marketing strategies will incorporate ideas to utilize this precious data to devise a strategy to yield satisfactory returns.
Customer’s lifestyles and behavior are easy to interpret and accumulate from social media platforms. IoT data leads digital marketers to create social media optimized content and advertisements may generate potential consumers. Therefore, IOT technology will bring a change in how digital marketing strategies will utilize social media benefits to bring in more potential customers or traffic.
7. Enhanced Feedback
IOT allows marketers to build a consumer relationship to enhance product improvement and understanding consumer needs. This improves the marketer’s chances to understand any product improvement required. Real-time feedback from customers provides valuable product/ service development and advancement insights.
Conclusion
The advent of IOT technology has brought various changes to the digital marketing industry as we see it now. IOT technology and its various aspects have introduced many niches of marketing strategies to improve how we visualize marketing. The conventional digital marketing strategies might have been disrupted due to IOT, but the paths that have opened up for improvement are enormous. IOT has brought fascinating opportunities to almost revolutionize digital marketing strategies. The major challenge of privacy still thrives, but that too will be more secure with time. This disruption by IOT has challenged marketers to improve and enhance their strategies and to take advantage of modern technology.
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