Better Marketing Through the iPad?
How can marketers use the iPad to engage with customers in new, effective ways? That’s a question occupying many marketing leaders. The transformative ideas that they are coming up with are reminiscent of the early days of the Web, when people were first unlocking the marketing value of that new medium. These new ideas also illustrate the merging of social collaboration with traditional content management.
The industry is seeing a massive new investment in marketing and sales strategies to engage, sell, and service customers through the online channel—both desktop and mobile. The new devices and the new strategies will necessitate new technology platform requirements for content management, social media, and social collaboration, all of which affect the customer experience and customer service.
Companies that make use of the iPad will be able to differentiate their brand, build greater customer loyalty, and ultimately drive high rates of return visits and sales. In the travel and hospitality industries, for example, the iPad can be used on-site in bars and restaurants as replacements or adjuncts to traditional menus. Service staff can carry their iPad to a guest and have the guest browse a catalog of drinks or entrees, read comments and suggestions from other guests, or read a chef or mixologist blog about a particular item on the menu. In addition, service staff will be able to take orders directly from the device itself.
In hotels, concierge staff will be able to leverage the iPad as “roving ambassadors” in the lobby to help answer questions and allow guests to find recommended attractions or local events. In higher-end hotels, the iPad will come to replace the traditional material found on hotel desks upon arrival, allowing guests to organize laundry pickup and room service directly from their digital device. In all three cases, the overall effect will be to streamline operations while giving guests a world-class experience that prompts a second stay and encourages them to spend more per visit.
In the retail industry, the iPad will transform both catalog promotions and in-store experiences. A rich interactive catalog experience on the iPad with recommendations and product discussions from like-minded peers may generate demand more readily than the traditional print catalog or desktop browsing experience does. In addition, in-store assistants will leverage the iPad to make product recommendations, find additional items to add to the shopping cart, and build out gift registries more easily than they can with a traditional kiosk.
New iPad applications will enable greater customer self-service for simple requests that people can easily and more happily deal with on their own. This increases both customer satisfaction and customer service staff productivity. With an iPad in hand, customer care representatives are empowered to give customers higher-quality service.
The availability of the iPad emphasizes the recent transformation of the content management industry and the rise of social collaboration. For the past couple of years, content management has transformed from an IT infrastructure tool focused on compliance and efficiency to a platform for improving the customer experience and subsequently meeting key business goals such as increased brand awareness and identification, increased Web or in-store traffic, and increased sales, loyalty, and retention. Part of this transformation has been the merging of social collaboration with traditional content management.
Managing content is necessary, of course, but it is not sufficient. You need to manage people, relationships, interactions, and conversations, holistically. The social element cannot be divorced from the content, because it’s the community participation that drives that context, value, and business results. Customer experience is about engaging, and that demands social interaction.
Kevin Cochrane is chief marketing officer for Web solutions provider Day Software.
