How the Internet of Everything is changing the world

moneycontrol.com

Imagine you are at work and your house has been broken into. There’s more that you can do than being blissfully unaware of the theft. Technology has made it possible to connect these seemingly mutually exclusive events and in turn, prevent the theft or help nab the culprits. Yes, make way for the Internet of Everything. With IoE, you can go beyond burglar alarms. IoE may make it possible to send real-time alerts to the nearest police station or also give you a live feed of the break-in on your handheld device.

Making the world a better place

While the Internet of Things -- that refers to the connectedness between devices -- has pretty much changed the way businesses work, IoE will take things a notch higher. And how will it make this happen? Along with connecting data, processes and devices, IoE will add people to the network as well. This network will then generate intelligible information that will help create new capabilities, richer experiences and unprecedented economic opportunity for businesses. In the future, as millions of devices interact with one another with minimal human intervention, businesses and processes will become more efficient. IoE also has the potential to impact governance and make it more effective and transparent. No wonder then, that Cisco projects the total IoE-related value at stake over the next 10 years to be $19 trillion.

Living in a world where everything is connected

A Cisco report titled ‘The Internet of Everything – How Relevant and Valuable Connections Will Change the World’ rightly observes: By combining people, process, data and things, the exponential power of the Internet will allow us to create exponential responses to the extraordinary challenges faced by individuals, businesses, and even whole countries.

Let us see how IoE will benefit humans, businesses and countries:

• Humans: As humans, we are very dependent on our senses to experience the world around us. IoE has the ability to become an exponential proxy for the different types of senses. This will end up giving silent things a voice.

• Businesses: By making processes more efficient and optimal, IoE will play a key role in creating opportunities for business expansion and driving up profits.

• Countries: Governments the world over are striving to provide better and economical services to citizens. IoE has the potential to benefit the public sector and allow governments to ensure privacy, safety and security of citizens.

Transforming the world around you

From smart parking in Nice, France that alerts drivers about open spaces to garbage cans with sensors in Finland that send signals when pick-up is needed, IoE is making the unthinkable possible. Even as we speak, it is transforming cities around the world, one connected device at a time.

Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group, in collaboration with City 24/7, a company that aims at making public communications more accessible, and the city of New York, has launched an interactive platform that integrates information from open government programs, local businesses, and citizens to provide meaningful and powerful knowledge anytime, anywhere, on any device.

As India embarks on an ambitious initiative to take the benefits of digitization to its masses, IoE will play a critical role. It will make cities smarter, safer and sustainable and greatly benefit sectors such as transportation and health.

Going ahead, the Internet of Everything will play an instrumental role in helping countries fight climate change, eradicate hunger, bring down instances of diseases and save water.

IoE is the future

There no doubt will be hurdles in implementing IoE and some of its abilities may seem magnified and exaggerated now, but it certainly has the potential to change the world we live in and make it more efficient and environment-friendly. There will also be challenges related to security, privacy, and reliability of such a technology and to overcome these, governments and countries must come together and engage in discussions.

The possibilities of  IoE making the world a better place are infinite. All it needs are open minds and a spirit of co-operation between people.

How retailers can score a deal on Facebook’s mobile app install ads

internetretailer.com

Using the social network’s mobile ad network, retailers paid 9% less per thousand impressions than those who targeted consumers’ mobile news feed in the first quarter.

Advertisers looking to save money driving shoppers to download their apps can use Audience Network, Facebook’s mobile ad network that lets marketers target Facebook ads to consumers off of the social network in such apps as the Huffington Post and Shazam.

Marketers who used Audience Network to place mobile app install ads in Facebook users’ mobile news feeds and on other apps paid, on average, $8.17 per thousand impressions in the first quarter, while those whose ads only appeared in Facebook users’ mobile news feeds paid $8.99, according to Salesforce’s new report “Social.com Q1 2015 Advertising Benchmark.”

While impressions cost less for marketers who used Audience Network than those whose mobile app install ads that appeared only in consumers’ Facebook mobile news feeds, consumers were less likely to click through on off-Facebook ads and install the apps. That resulted in a cost per click for Audience Network mobile app install ads of 96 cents versus 85 cents for Facebook mobile news feed-only ads and the cost per install for Audience Network ads was $3.37, 17.4% higher than the $2.87 cost for mobile news feed-only ads.

Despite performing behind the mobile news feed, Salesforce suggests that marketers try Audience Network, and predicts more marketers will do so in the second half of the year.

The report also finds that the cost per thousand impressions in the e-commerce in the first quarter compared with the fourth quarter was $5.06 versus $5.07 (the report didn’t provide year-over-year data). However, the cost per click fell dramatically— to 31 cents from 59 cents—thanks to the click-through rate jumping from 0.87% to 1.65%.

On Twitter, Salesforce found that the cost per thousand impressions for promoted tweets, the ad unit that allows marketers to ensure that a certain percentage of consumers see a brand’s post, fell 10.8%— to $8.92 from $10 in the fourth quarter. The cost per engagement (Twitter requires advertisers to bid based on some action, such as a click on a tweet, link click or video view) rose 1 cent— to 45 cents in the first quarter from 44 cents in the fourth quarter. However, the engagement on the ads fell to 2% in the first quarter from 2.3% in the fourth quarter.

The Salesforce report is based on more than 2 trillion ad impression and 200 billion ad engagements by Salesforce Marketing Cloud customers from October 2014 to March.

App store optimization: What is it and why do I need it?

techinasia.com

What is ASO?

The concept is fairly simple. App Store Optimization (ASO) is a lot like SEO (Search Engine Optimization), except here you are trying to make your app easily visible on the App Store, Google Play, or other similar app marketplaces. You also, however, need to convince people to actually download the app. After all, what’s the point of developing and marketing an app if no one actually uses it? The key to ASO is to attract a crowd that will actually be interested and won’t uninstall your app after a few weeks. It is thus of high importance to have a good understanding of your target audience, such as what keywords they are typing into the search bar.

Why should you care?

According to a Forrester study, 63% of app discoveries occur just by browsing app stores. The search bar is the largest channel that leads to app installs. There are over a million apps on the App Store and Google Play, and they are in a never ending race to grab a higher ranking than their competitors. Everyone is utilizing any tool they can to market their app, so if you are not taking advantage of what ASO has to offer, you are falling behind.

How do I develop good ASO?

Obviously, understand what keywords are relevant and prevalent among your audience.

You can use certain services that will allow you to track which words are popular, your search rankings, your competitors’ strategies, etc. in order to optimize your ASO. However, you should also remember that while it may be easy to stuff your description with keywords, there’s a point where it just makes your app sound obnoxious.

Your app’s name is important as well. It should be short and sweet, yet catchy and informative. Realize that the keyword that is placed in the title needs to be the one that will bring in the most search traffic, so take some time to think about the best choice of word to put in the title.

Finally, take a look at the ratings/reviews of your app. Many potential app users will take a look at these, and a rating can be a huge determinant in whether or not someone converts or not. Find ways to incentivize happy users to rate your app and reply immediately to negative responses.

Exclusive: How Virgin Active is getting fit with the Internet of Things

Virgin want to use IoT to make its service more holistic and improve customer retention

businesscloudnews.com

Virgin Active is embarking on an ambitious redesign of its facilities that uses the Internet of Things to improve the service it offers to customers and reduce subscriber attrition rates, explains Andy Caddy, chief information officer of Virgin Active.

“Five years ago you didn’t really need to be very sophisticated as a health club operator in terms of your IT and digital capability,” Caddy says. “But now I would argue that things have changed dramatically – and you have to be very smart about how you manage your relationship with customers.”

The health club sector is one of the most unique subscription-based businesses around, in part because the typical attrition rate is around 50 per cent – meaning by the end of the year the club has lost half of the members it started out with, and needs to gain new subscribers by at least as much in order to grow on aggregate. That’s quite a challenge to tackle.

Much of how Virgin Active intends to address this is through more clever use of data, and to use cloud-based software and IoT sensors to help better understand what its customers are doing inside and beyond the gym. The company’s vision involves creating once consolidated view of the customer, collating information stored on customers’ smartphones with health data generated from wearable sensors and gym machines being used by those customers.

The company is already in the process of trialling this vision with a new fitness club at Cannon Street, London, which opens later this month. Originally announced last year, the club, which Caddy says is to be Virgin Active’s flagship technology club, uses RFID chip-embedded membership wrist bands that can be used to do everything from entering the gym and logging cardiovascular data from the machines they use to buying drinks at the café, renting towels and accessing lockers.

“Now we start to see what people are doing in the clubs, which gives us a richer set of data to work with, and it starts to generate insights that are more relevant and engaging and perhaps also feeds our CRM and product marketing,” he says. “Over the next few months we’ll be able to compare this data with what we see at other clubs to find out a few important things – are we becoming more or less relevant to customers? Is customer retention improving?”

Combine that with IoT data from things like smartwatches that are worn outside the confines of the gym, and the company can get a better sense of how to improve what it suggests as a health or fitness activity from a holistic standpoint. It also means more effective marketing, which beckons a more sophisticated way of handling data and acting on it than it already does by Caddy’s admission.

“The kinds of questions I want to be able to answer for my customers are things like: What’s the kind of lunch I can eat tomorrow based on today’s activity? How should I change my calendar next week based on my current stress levels? These are the really interesting questions that would absolutely add value to [a customer’s] life and also create a reasonable extension of the role we’re already playing as a fitness provider.”

But Caddy says the vendors themselves, while pushing the boundaries in IoT from a technical standpoint, pose the biggest threats to the sector’s development.

“We want standards because it’s very hard to do anything when Nike want to talk about Fuel and Fitbit want to talk about Steps and Apple want to talk about Activity, and none of these things equal the same things,” he explains. “What we really want is some of these providers to start thinking about how you do something smart with that information, and what you need in order to do that, but I’m always surprised by how few vendors are asking those kinds of questions.”

“It’s an inevitable race to the bottom in sensor tech; the value is all in the data.”

Companies like Apple and Microsoft know this – and in health specifically are attempting to build out their own data services that developers can tap into for their own applications. But again, those are closed, proprietary systems, and it may be some time before the IoT sector opens up to effectively cater a multi-device, multi-cloud world.

“We’re lucky in a sense because health and fitness is one of the first places where IoT has taken off in a real sense. But to be honest, we’re still a good way from where we want to be,” he says.

4 Fringe Marketing Ideas and What We Can Learn From Them

business2community.com

Marketing is a really intricate system of finding a niche audience and getting their attention. In the days when things were simpler when there were less online forums and social media outlets to cover, you could just simply rent a billboard and work with the customers you got. The twenty-first century has introduced us to a lot of new marketing techniques (some of them quite fringe) that went on to have remarkable and shocking results. Here are a few of the more notable marketing techniques in the last couple years that have really stood out and what we can get out of their success.

Burger King’s “the Whopper Sacrifice” App

The idea behind it was simple: select ten of your friends, unfriend them, and get a free whopper. Burger King only managed to give away 20,000 Whoppers before Facebook shut down the App, but what the app did was to focus on the very core of social media. Are your friends worth keeping or would you get rid of ten of them for free fast food? Even though the app didn’t last long it had a lasting impact on social media marketers. It teaches us that we shouldn’t be afraid to push the envelope, and that even the simplest calls to action work really well when coupled with a great deal.

True Blood: Revelation from HBO

HBO’s marketing campaign for the first season of True Blood is one of the all-time greats for building a story around something. Focusing on the horror genre, popular horror bloggers were sent packages with information that alluded to their new release, along with information that led them on a trail to uncover what HBO was plotting for their new series. None of the associated media ever mentioned anything about the new TV show; it was all background story. Because of this campaign, True Blood was one of the most anticipated shows that HBO had ever produced. What HBO taught us is that a niche audience can be leveraged to raise publicity about something and that storytelling goes a really long way to building the hype for something.

“Elf Yourself” by Office Max

Building on holiday tradition, Elf Yourself capitalized on a previous underutilized interactive technology by allowing users to put their friends, co-workers, or pretty much anyone in an e-card featuring them dancing as elves which could then be shared around. It has become something of a holiday tradition with some people, something that’s almost unheard of in viral marketing. What we learn from the Elf Yourself campaign is that if you give people something new and seasonal it could easily turn into an every-year thing if it’s well-received enough. We also see that shareability of a marketing campaign such as this only serves to make the campaign grow exponentially.

The Old Spice Guy

The team that turned “I’m on a horse,” into a recognizable Internet phrase had its debut in 2010 with a simple ad that brought humor, sex appeal, and intrigue, breathing new life into a brand that had turned into a bit of a joke before that point. What we learned from the Old Spice Guy is that appeal should be to your entire audience. If you have a spokesperson, make sure that he’s well-liked all around. Also, keeping your clips short, concise and to the point with a catchy end phrase or a recognizable theme (the Old Spice Whistle in this case) does a whole lot for your brand in terms of recognition.

Think Outside the Box

Although you may not have the same kind of budget these companies have when they develop their marketing strategies, you can still learn quite a lot from them. Following their lead can allow you a level of success that is comparable, although on a smaller scale, when it comes to your own marketing endeavors. These simple, yet genius marketing ideas prove that interesting content can go viral! Don’t be afraid to try new things or to push the envelope. Your success hinges on your ability to spread your message. Seize your opportunities to do so.

Twitter Introduces Video App Ads, Bidding Based On Actions & Installs

marketingland.com

Twitter announced several additions to its app install advertising tool kit today.

Advertisers will be able to promote apps within video ads and optimize bidding for installs and actions. Here’s how Twitter described the new bidding features, to be rolled out globally in the coming months, in a blog post:

Optimized action bidding: This new bidding type allows app install advertisers to optimize their bids according to install, while still paying by app click — offering another way to lower cost-per-installs and yield the highest possible ROI.

Cost per install bidding: Advertisers can bid, optimize and pay by install giving you cost-efficiency and maximum control over your cost per install.

Also, Twitter said app marketers will soon be able to target mobile users on Twitter partner apps on more than 1 billion mobile devices. Gaming company Kabam has seen strong results in testing. “We’ve been thrilled to have multiplied the scale of our top 10 grossing Marvel: Contest of Champions install campaigns by 5x by running them on Twitter partner apps,” Kabam vp of marketing Jordan Edelstein said in the Twitter blog post. “We look forward to the opportunity using mobile app promotion to help maintain Kabam’s market leadership position.”

Twitter, which introduced its app install ad products a year ago, said advertisers using the program are seeing high returns on investment across all verticals, from tech to entertainment to retail. It said delivery service Postmates doubled conversions and experienced cost per install rates 25% lower than other ad platforms. Lyft said it’s getting up to three times better performance than other social channels. Comedy Central said it has exceeded its CPI goals by 66%.

Ticketing service SeatGeek is also pleased. “Over the course of the last year, we’ve consistently been able to beat our cost per install targets by 20% on several hundred thousand installs,” SeatGeek director of growth Will Flaherty said in the Twitter post. “We saw strong gains in cost efficiency using tailored audiences to exclude previous app installs from our user acquisition campaigns, even as we’ve continued to scale our efforts.”

Building a content strategy for the internet of things

theguardian.com

In a connected world, marketers must use content to provide great experiences for people instead of just being a way to deliver advertising messages

Content in a connected world of things has endless possibilities. 

The idea of content is changing. It’s no longer just about videos, social posts and websites. Our fridges, washing machines and watches are serving us recipes, news, entertainment and advice. It’s all part of a new, encompassing, connected world – the internet of things (IoT).

IoT is a complex, adaptive performance of ideas and information – content – perfectly choreographed with our behaviours. What we want, where we want it, on whatever device is within reach.

Brands are racing to understand what this means for how they talk to customers. These new touchpoints require rethinking how content can work for these new screens in our homes, on our wrists and in places we haven’t even thought of yet.

While content strategy is part of a bigger process spanning technology, industrial engineering and experience design, understanding the role it can play is critical to success within IoT.

After all, the goal is to deliver relevant content in the right contexts.

Experience-first thinking

Content strategists usually plan the content that drives websites, apps and brands. Now, they are finding themselves in teams designing systems where hardware, human habits and physical spaces intertwine.

Alongside experience designers and creatives, content strategists are an important part of defining how content powers and populates these ever-evolving networks of connected things.

Does entertainment news only belong on the TV and recipes on the fridge? How should content respond to people’s behaviours? How does it adapt to different touchpoints?

As IoT systems get bigger and more complex, content strategists will also be a part of exploring the physical influence content can have over a connected space. Setting a room light to blink when a piece of content is most relevant, for example.

When it comes to IoT, we’re really coordinating something bigger than just a network of content – we’re building rich, lived experiences. This means we need to define the experience before we burrow into the technology, interfaces and content.

Experience-first thinking also illustrates how important content strategy is to the mechanics of ideas, information and behaviours we encounter in the connected world.

Innovative, insightful content marketing

Every day, businesses ask about IoT and what it means for their brands. Part of this is exploring what it means for content marketing and native advertising initiatives.

As we’ve seen with products like Nike+, brands can innovate their way into people’s daily routines. In the same way, to market within IoT, you need to find ways to enrich lives in exciting and valuable ways. After all, most people won’t want ads appearing on their expensive fridges.

The same principles apply to content marketing in connected spaces.

A precise understanding of where, when and how your brand should appear illuminates the right opportunities and ensures you emerge in sensible, welcome ways.

This also involves a layer of innovation: what are the latent or subconscious needs of your customers and how can you create something wonderful to satisfy them?

If we take the time to understand these things, there is unlimited potential to create a connected experience that does for content marketing what Nike+ did for mobile, apps and sports marketing.

Rule of thumb: build the right teams and don’t skimp on strategic thinking. Valuable content built around rigorous customer insights is the difference between Red Bull and preloading a U2 album.

Start with insights, finish with experiences

To make sure IoT-delivered experiences are meaningful and useful, we must take the time to carefully understand the role that real-time, personalised and poignant content can have. And part of this is defining how it’s made, maintained, and served – in other words, content strategy.

While content strategists can’t do this on their own, their traditional skills around change management, publishing and taxonomy design are valuable parts of building these experiences.

When it comes to connected content marketing, everything needs to start with careful insights and a strategy built around what people actually want – not simply what your brand wants to say.

Content in a connected world of things has endless possibilities. It can grow, change, adapt and connect with people in seemingly impossible ways. The best way to unlock this potential is to involve smart content thinkers.

How to take over the app store in 48 Hours

thenextweb.com

It’s obvious enough that a newly launched app can’t really take off on its own – vast marketing efforts are vital to accomplishing any kind of exposure and acquiring an initial user base. After launching their app, marketers often watch eagerly and anxiously as the first users pile on. However, in many cases early-stage apps take a long time to develop an active user ecosystem, and in most cases fail to do so.

It’s important to remember that the launch period of an app is a critical time for marketing since it’s an opportunity to be spotted as a hot new product. Many companies launch an app without the appropriate marketing efforts and end up regretting it after realizing the opportunity that escaped from them.

So app marketers – stop anxiously waiting for a miracle to happen and pursue the results yourselves! How do you launch with-a-bang and attract a maximum amount of users in a minimal amount of time?

The answer is “burst campaign.” Taking aggressive marketing measures using a relatively high budget in a time span of 48 hours in order to achieve visibility, increase organic download volumes, reach high app store rankings, and go viral.

But first, let’s put things in context. In order to reach the app store’s top charts, an app needs to be one of the most downloaded apps in a certain country on a specific day. The exact figure varies from country to country, depending on the number of mobile devices used by its population as well as the total amount of daily downloads in the country’s app store on that day. Achieving such a high volume of downloads in a single day as a newly-launched app is extremely challenging and nearly impossible.

Most of you must be thinking it’s completely reckless to go through so much of a company’s budget after just launching an app, however, it’s worth the risk. Choosing the right launch strategy can make or break your app, so instead of thinking of this as a one-time splurge, consider it a long-term investment. Acquiring a large amount of organic users right in the beginning is only a launchpad for more and more to come.

I’d like to use an example from my own experience working with Pfizer. The company set out to launch an app that aims to educate the market about its solution for Growth Hormone Deficiency in children, which enables parents to track their children’s development. Pfizer’s main goal was to promote the app to a prominent spot in the app store.

Our main goal was for the app to reach a prominent spot in the app store while attracting as many parents as possible to it. We starting by rolling out a highly targeted mobile campaign that lasted two days and ran on various social, RTBs and ad networks.

Within 48 hours, Pfizer Reached the App Store’s Top 3 most downloaded apps, thus increasing organic download rates and lowering CPI. The average CPI during the campaign period was half of the average cost in the market. Our most outstanding accomplishment however, was attracting quality users, ten of thousands of parents that used the app and remained active for a long period of time.

So how’s it really done? Let me break it down for you:

What to Do

Concentrate your efforts on a short period of time for an aggressive marketing campaign and focus on the following steps:

Media Buying

• Run campaigns across as many ad networks, RTBs, exchanges and major social platforms as possible. The goal is to reach as many users as possible, and therefore maximizing your sources can be instrumental in reaching that goal.
• Do not opt for incentivized platforms or bots as it’s against Google Play and Apple policy and compromises the quality of users. It might seem tempting but make an effort to refrain from incentivized platforms, as they won’t earn you engaged and active, loyal users.
• Check the price of each offering and choose the cheaper kinds in order to maximize your budget. As mentioned earlier, the goal here is to purchase media from as many sources as possible, and if you opt for the more expensive ones you’ll simply run through your budget quicker.

Monitoring

• Check your results in real time, ideally once every hour. Since the campaign runs for a relatively short period of time, it’s important to check in as frequently as possible to make sure you’re heading in the right direction.
• Optimize your campaign results according to the data you receive. Checking your campaign results regularly allows you to catch problems and deal with them immediately.
• Once you’ve reached the App Store’s Top Ten, continue purchasing downloads until your budget runs out in order to stay in the top ranking for as long as possible.

What to Expect

• A high App Store ranking
• A dramatic boost in organic downloads as a direct result of a high placement in the App Store’s top ranked apps
• A significantly lower CPI as a result of the massive amount of organic downloads
• An established user base

As you’ve probably noticed, the actual process is more complex than it seems. Most global brands and startups don’t have an experienced team of media buyers and creative professionals who are able to deliver top level results. Achieving outstanding results requires an outstanding team, and therefore my last suggestion would be to spot a trusted partner to work with that’s able to perform to that level on mobile.

Read Next: 3 SEO tips to boost mobile app downloads

How the datafication of marketing is affecting the mobile experience

imediaconnection.com

Marketers have never had greater access to customer data than they do today. And as a result, we'll start to see greater uses of data to provide more context in how customers engage on mobile devices. Additionally, more and more marketers will get better at using their data for marketing purposes. It's going to be a scramble in the digital marketing world to harness and use customer data from the mobile experience, and as more people are starting to experiment with this, those who miss the boat will be left far, far behind.

We can see a trend in mobile advertising, where perhaps the biggest bucks are being spent on mobile. The CPC campaigns, where it all began, died at the hands of more complex CPI campaigns. Once advertisers started paying for installs, the focus shifted from enticing users to click to having them actually download the app. This would only be possible once conversion tracking tech becomes more commonplace and the tech stabilizes a little. Retargeting and re-engagement then comes into play, as the tech develops even a little further. All along, the ecosystem is working on using the data and tech that's being built up to provide users with better experiences. This next movement is growing out of that same drive.

Today, most mobile apps are static in that they don't respond well to context. Apps more or less always behave the same regardless of who you are, where you are, and what you do. Yet now we're starting to see more and more companies experiment with using customer source data and injecting it into apps for contextualizing the customer experience. Good targeting was just the first step. Now we're entering an era where marketers are able to move large quantities of data around in order to do some really innovative things to contextualize conversations with customers.

These techniques seem daunting to a lot of people, but they aren't that complicated.

So how can you ensure that you're not left in the dust?
If you have a tracking system in place, you already have tons of data to engage your customers on a much more personal level. The following are some key use cases that you can start using today:

Customize the on-boarding experience

Leverage your real-time advertising data to optimize the initial in-app user experience. By using data you're already capturing about your customers from the ads they click, you can dynamically match the content in your on-boarding process to the ads the customer was shown, and tailor the on-board views based on ad messaging and images that were clicked.

For instance, tech fashion startup Vinted decided to customize its initial customer on-boarding experience by using advertising data. The company tracks dozens of advertising sources and the performance of each ad creative displayed. By funneling data, such as the product image and message displayed, in the ad to the customer, Vinted was able to pull the ad creative shown and generate the on-boarding process dynamically when the customer opened the app for the first time. By creating a more contextually relevant in-app experience for new customers, Vinted was able to increase their conversion rates and customer engagement from the onset.

Through excellent targeting, many app businesses are great at targeting specific USPs and use cases to specific customers, but fall short when it comes to emphasizing those selling points in the product itself. In one case, a mobile payments provider converts customers from many different verticals: flea market stands, independent coffee shops, or service providers on the go. Each of these customers has varying contexts in which they use the service and problems that the service solves. By looking at the marketing data, the app is able to serve a different on-boarding process, including customized video material that seamlessly ties into the wording and USPs that the creatives sell to customers.

Drive social referrals

Did you know that social referrals can become smarter by mixing in tracking data?

More and more app developers are starting to build better social referral mechanisms. Each social referral is a source, like a creative, and many already track the performance of customers who are coming specifically from referrals from other customers. By plugging this data into the chain, the app can immediately pull up your friends' profiles and deliver rewards in real-time, before a standard funnel even takes place.

By building those social connections, you can create smart social recognition connections, close the referral circle to track results, and increase your customer referrals volume.

Streamline couponing

Especially in re-engagement campaigns, we're starting to see numerous apps offering special deals via coupons for customers who return to the app. Being able to pull this data directly from a straightforward API when the customer first opens the app allows your app to contain all its functionality, knowing in real-time immediately, and with no visible delay, if the coupon should be redeemed or not.

For instance, if you give someone a coupon for a pizza off Delivery Hero, you can not only start the app by showing the available pizza places, you'll immediately discount it at the checkout. This is a completely new experience we're starting to see rising among app marketing that's leading to increases in conversion rates.

It's not too late to start using more data

Marketing data is the future of mobile apps and customer experiences -- and there's no doubt in the industry that this need for more and better marketing data and the tools to manage it will continue to grow.

It's time to ask yourself if you are using the data sources that you have at your fingertips most efficiently to engage your customers.

How are you best using your advertising data? Your in-app data? Your partner data?

The future haves and have-nots in marketing will be separated by how effectively they are using their customer data. If you haven't already, now is the time to begin taking big steps in connecting your customer data and actions inside and outside the app experience to create a brighter future.

Connected travel: Highlights of the 2015 Airline IT Trends Survey

kippreport.com

Three years from now, travelling will be an entirely different experience

1. More than 80 per cent of airlines are focused on solutions to improve personalisation, according to SITA’s 2015 Airline IT Trends Survey

2. 74 per cent of airlines are planning to offer unassisted self bag-drop by 2018, compared with 17 per cent today

3. 70 per cent of airlines expect to have baggage location status updates by 2018, compared with the ten per cent who currently have that service

4. 86 per cent of airlines strongly agree that Internet of Things will present clear benefits in the next three years

Do you think airlines are focusing on the customer enough?

According to SITA’s 2015 Airline IT Trends Survey, more than 80 per cent of airlines are focused on solutions to improve personalisation, with 52 per cent investing in major programmes in the next three years.

Want to know how the aviation industry will mature by 2018? According to the survey:

1. Promotion of airline offers will become much more apparent, with a whopping 91 per cent of airlines planning on adding this service, compared with 55 per cent of airlines who currently have the service.

2. Ancillary services sales via kiosks are set to be added by 2018 by 73 per cent of airlines, up from only 19 per cent who currently offer the service.

3. 72 per cent of airlines are planning to add airlines services such as seat bookings, meals, Wi-Fi, lounge access, etc. by 2018, versus only 33 per cent who currently have these services.

4. 69 per cent of airlines are planning to add other travel services such as cars, hotels, transport, parking and more to their shopping services. Only 22 per cent have them today.

5. 47 per cent of airlines are planning to add a duty free shopping app to their services list, compared with 11 per cent who currently have the service.

According to the survey, unassisted self bag-drop is on the rise, with 74 per cent of airlines planning to offer the service by 2018, up from only 17 per cent today, allowing passengers to be independent during their travels. In addition to that, 70 per cent of airlines expect to have baggage location status updates by 2018 while only ten per cent who currently have that service.

The study also shows that airlines are embracing the digital world and are working hard to meet their customers on the platforms they are already on – their Smartphones. As many as 86 per cent of airlines strongly agree that Internet of Things (IoT) will present clear benefits in the next three years, but only 37 per cent have allocated a budget allowance to implement IoT.

Want to know more? Have a look at the infographic below.