The Internet Of Things And How It Applies To Content Marketing

We’ve started a conversation with things. We wear smart watches and tell them how far we’re walking. We put on fitness bracelets, and tell them how fast our hearts are beating. We install thermostats in our homes and tell them the temperature we want our living rooms and even when we’re in them. Our cars know our location, our televisions know our favorite shows, our smart washing machines understand our laundry habits.

And that’s just the beginning. According to Gartner Research, 6.4 billion objects will be connected to the Internet in 2016, a 30% rise over the previous year. Refrigerators will soon understand which food items we’re missing and be able to place an order for a refill automatically. More light bulbs will be able to tell when we’re watching television and dim accordingly. And, of course, bridges will be able to monitor stress and cracks, traffic lights will react to traffic flows, heating systems will respond to the number of people in the room.

The “Internet of Things” is the Internet’s next step and it opens a whole new world of communication.

If we can talk to our objects—our watches and bracelets, our thermostats and our kitchen appliances—they’ll need to be able to talk back. They’ll need to tell us what the information we’re giving them means and how we can make good use of it.

Their voices will be supplied by content marketers because that information won’t just be about confirming data or supplying knowledge. Like any communication between a brand and a customer the conversation that takes place through the Internet of Things should bring the customer closer to the brand.

In this series of posts, we’re going to look at what the coming Internet of Things means for content marketers.

We’ll explore what it means for the timing of communication. When we’re receiving data from customers in real time, we can supply not just the information customer needs but we can deliver it to them at exactly the time that it’s most relevant and most likely to be acted on.

The content we deliver will also be more personalized and more relevant than ever before. At the moment, content marketers speak to personas, carefully constructed simulacra of a brand’s customers. As we receive more data about individual customers, we’ll be able to craft unique messages for each of them. That’s always been the marketer’s dream, and it’s starting to happen now.

Finally, we’ll look at some of the kinds of content we can expect to be producing based on the data flowing through the Internet of Things, and we’ll explore what we’ll want that content to do.

The Internet first enabled us to talk to each other. It’s now enabling us to talk to our possessions who pass on those messages to the companies that created them. When content marketers enable those possessions to talk back, businesses will have a whole new way to engage with customers.

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