IBM Embarks on a Journey into the Land of Marketing

Last week product marketers were the highlight of show at the IBM Amplify conference. Throughout the conference IBM directors deliberated the hottest trends in marketing and declared several new products in its Marketing Cloud lineup. IBM is providing product marketers with the capability to chart customer journeys across digital touch points, a set of analytics tools to segment those shoppers, and a way to target them with automated campaigns. IBM sent a familiar message to marketers – It’s all about the customer. IBM’s new technology is focused on helping marketers understand how the costumers are behaving in relation to their products and even their brand in general. In my blog we discuss business-to-consumer and (B2C) business-to-business (B2B) marketing, but general manager of IBM Commerce, Deepak Advani announced at Amplify conference  that IBM is about to become a customer-to-business (C2B) operation: “It’s about understanding what makes people tick and doing something to turn them into customers, to turn them into advocates”.

Driving in Reverse: Consumer to Business

In contrast with the more old-style business-to-consumer model, the C2B (consumer-to-business) model allows businesses to extract significance from clients – and vice versa. In the C2B model, businesses yield from the inclination of consumers to name their own price or give data or marketing to the company, while consumers profit from flexibility and obtain services for reduced fee or sometimes free of charge. C2B is an original and emerging sector of the business market that can function as a company’s entire business model, or that can expand an already successful venture. As in all models, your company’s achievement will be subject to your thorough understanding of the marketplace and your readiness to pursue novel technologies. Pursuing a C2B attitude is a strategic option and necessitates a guarantee to involve the consumer in business choices. This takes extra determination and funds to avoid being internally fixated, but it is critical for a business that wants to prosper in a consumer-driven industry.

The IBM ‘Journey’ Marketing Products

2 products currently exist in IBM’s line of Journey marketing tools: Journey Analytics –Analytics will give marketers understandings into how their promotions are running from several different scopes. Marketers can view what conversion lanes lead to the highest returns. Journey Designer – Designed to go hand-in-hand with Analytics, A marketing tool with a visual way to organize a customer’s journey through various digital touch points with the product. With a drag and drop interface and flow-chart style design for shaping campaigns, marketers can set up a clear marketing method and then check back to see if it’s effective. A teamwork feature allows coworkers to work on the same campaign in real-time. At the core of IBM’s new ‘Journey’ marketing products is technology from acquiring Silverpop. The technology makes personalization easier by automating the customer experience based on insights drawn from data streams — such as social, web, email and mobile activity. It basically allows marketers to use these profiles to bring unique, personalized experiences for customers. As of now Silverpop’s capabilities are infused across IBM’s enterprise marketing portfolio to make it easier for clients of any size to acquire and retain the value of their customers.

IBM Takes on Facebook’s Data

Another attempt by IBM increase its attractiveness as a marketing platform was the latest contract with the world’s largest social network. Users of IBM Commerce software now gain access into the statistics its customers transfer into facebook. This means that IBM’s clients will have access to Facebook’s Custom Audiences tool for constructing targeted promotions. This data offers more perception about their customers, including their interests, thoughts and anticipations of brands they care about. The IBM Journey Designer and Journey Analytics will render relationships between customers on Facebook and their interactions across other channels, and Designer will be able to generate campaigns that use this data to aim at specific types of customers further enhancing the effectiveness of these tools.

Measuring Digital Marketing  with DQ

Companies need to make strategic decisions about the best ways to build  a concrete customer base. Many quote digital as their top main concern in this concern, but few have taken the time to measure the level of digital development their organization has attained. A company’s digital quotient (DQ) is a function of how well defined its long-term digital strategy is, its efficiency in applying that strategy, and the power of information technologies. The companies that embrace the concept of DQ such as IBM can effectively monitor their progress across the digital capabilities they offer, this might be the ‘secret sauce’ behind IBM’s sustained success in a diversity of markets.