This sponsored post is produced in association with IBM Silverpop.
The ways consumers use mobile devices in their daily lives today compared to just a couple of years ago has changed dramatically. It’s no longer about sending a simple text message to your friend. It’s about keeping up with Instagram, streaming music from Spotify, and asking Siri what’s the best road to take you home. And with technology advancements improving mobile usability by the second comes a new mindset on how to approach the product.
“We used to have something in our homes called the TV. Now it’s that screen,” Josh Rochlin, Global Business Leader, Mobile Engagement at IBM Commerce, said in his interview with VentureBeat. “And we used to talk about doing things on our mobile app and we used to think that meant it’s while we were out and about. Well, today it could be the mobile device in your home. How does the marketer face the challenge of a newly empowered consumer?”
According to Forbes, mobile engagement providers will be a $32.4 billion market in the year 2018. So, it’s essential for marketers to crack the code and deliver exceptional services to the user.
“We’ve gotten to the point where the marketer’s role is very difficult,” Rochlin explains. “What do I do to juggle all of these pieces of data on the one hand, content on the other hand, and customer reactions on the other hand?”
“What we’ve done is allow the marketer to address their consumer through all those channels,” continues Rochlin, “while collecting all of the data and analytics that is available to the modern market…by exposing all of these different touchpoints to the marketer. So that somebody in content production can be speaking with someone in inventory, can be speaking with somebody else who’s in an outbound email content production. All of that has to be collaborative and we have to be able to deal with that in real time.”
Certainly, the daily glut of available data on its own is meaningless, says Rochlin. “If what we’re doing is simply collecting data and haven’t in place the tools to make meaning of that data — and then be able to react to it — well we might as well go home.” Instead, he emphasizes the need to set certain triggers in place: “So that I know that when I see a certain number of customers coming after a certain product — if I hear a certain amount of chatter about my product on Twitter, if I see a certain number of likes of Facebook — that creates a trigger that my marketing department can react to.”
But as important as making actionable sense of all this data, Rochlin warns marketers how critical it is to be looking at the Internet of Things very seriously and how it will impact them. “You will have a car that will be aware of how many gallons of gas it has in its tank that speaks to the gas station that’s four miles away and six miles away. Those staions will be bidding for you to come into their stations.”
For more with Rochline about what marketers need to be aware about with mobile engagement, watch the full interview conducted by VentureBeat.
Also…check out VB’s free on-demand webinar on the Five fundamentals of killer mobile engagement featuring Josh Rochlne as well as VB’s VP of Research John Koetsier.
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