The internet of things (IoT) describes a set of technologies characterised by interconnectivity not just with their users, but with others. Rather than being a thing in and of itself, the IoT can be thought of as an ecosystem made up of various physical objects and the human beings who use them. These devices engage in large scale exchanges of data that allow them to automate many tasks that people traditionally had to do.
The IoT has infiltrated every aspect of daily life, including the business world, and entrepreneurs and managers would be remiss not to take advantage of it. Industrial IoT, for instance, has had a major impact on a range of different industries, spanning from healthcare to agriculture and even mining, fabrication, retail, hospitality, and much more. Simply put, any business that could benefit from having centralised management software that oversees everything from stock levels to staff rostering, can benefit from investing in the IIoT (or the ‘industrial internet of things’).
If you want to use the IoT to your advantage and grow your business but aren’t quite sure where to start, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we’ll go through some practical ways to use the internet of things in a business setting.
Connect with Your Customers
The IoT gives you a fresh channel to connect with your customers before, during and after a purchase takes place, and it does this in a few interesting ways. One is that it lets you receive real-time data from the products they buy from you even after they’ve taken them home. This way, you’ll be able to know things like when they’re being used and when they need repair or maintenance, often before your customers do.
Your products being connected to the IoT also saves your customers time and money, which increases the value they receive and makes it more likely they’ll buy from you again – even if just to enjoy your streamlined and low-stress customer experience once more. The simplest way this can be done is by designing devices to switch off when they know they’re not being used. If something the device needs to function is running low (like ink for printers), the re-ordering process can also be automated within some parameters.
Improve your Product Offering
The data that businesses gain from the IoT has the potential to play a critical role in the development of new products and the improvement of existing ones. Because you’ll be able to measure things like how often customers are using your products, when they’re using them and what common problems they face, you can make improvements to future versions of your products without conducting traditional customer studies.
The information you gather on how your customers are using your products can also give you an insight into their overall behaviour. Sometimes, this can lead to the development of a totally new product offering based on a new need that the IoT has helped you discover. So in a nutshell, IoT technologies may also be able to contribute to other product improvement initiatives like product training and data-driven review processes that ultimately help to improve your company’s product and service offerings.
Use the IoT in Your Marketing Efforts
While the IoT is affecting all sectors of business, marketing is possibly the area where it’s having the greatest impact. Marketing is all about understanding your customers and potential customers, and the IoT gives you new ways of doing that.
One thing the IoT allows you to do is to advertise to existing customers through the products they’ve already bought from you. You can take this a step further and personalise these advertisements to each individual customer based on their previous interactions with the product, which is data that the IoT gives you access to.
Measuring the effectiveness of your marketing operations is key to business success. Without data on what’s working and what isn’t, you’ll be working in the dark when deciding what to do next. The IoT makes it easier than ever to gather real-time data from your customers and quantify how effective your various strategies are.
The IoT in Manufacturing and Logistics
The IoT allows you to maximise efficiency when it comes to manufacturing and logistics. Some practical ways this happens are a quicker response time when a machine needs maintenance, real-time tracking of vehicles and better waste management.
For delivery companies or companies that do their own deliveries, the IoT can save you time and money by giving you the data you need to better manage your fleet of delivery vehicles. Because you’ll be able to track where each one is at any given time and when one needs a touchup, you’ll have the ability to optimise travel routes and plan ahead for periods of maintenance for particular vehicles.
If you’re a business owner, it would be remiss of you not to at least consider using the IoT to improve your company. As we’ve gone through in this article, the IoT has plenty of uses in areas like customer service, product design, marketing, manufacturing and logistics, as well as plenty others that we haven’t had the time to cover. If you don’t get in soon, your competitors probably will.
We hope that this article can act as a launchpad for you to integrate IoT technologies into your business’s daily operational processes. If you think it’s something that can help, there’s no time like the present to look for ways to make it work for you.
