Smartwatch and Digital Marketing

One of the most successful project ever launched on Kickstarter, the Pebble watch, crowd-sourced more than $10 million from 85,000 backers. This indicates that there's an interest and great potential in smartwatch, which is a piece of wearable computerised device with features such as connectivy to the internet, running of mobile apps, cell phone, text/video messaging, GPS navigation, and more.

Data is the most important component of a marketing approach and everything we do online generates data. More relevant and detailed data about a person's lifestyle and habits could be obtained through the usage of wearable devices such as a smartwatch. While a phone would be able to tell you where someone's from and what they're doing, a smartwatch will be telling you how they are feeling, how healthy they are or how hard they are working out. By combining location with lifestyle data, marketers will have a much more granular understanding of a person's behaviour and they can then enhance their targeting of customers and better engage them with personalised marketing programmes.

For example, a fitness gym could then send out targeted push notification to people who work out, rather than those who read fitness magazine while coupons for food could be offered to someone with medical condition when their blood sugar level is low. In these instances, context drives a more relevant message, which is better for both the marketer and the consumer as more effective marketing campaigns could be created. Marketers will then be able to build a long-term relationship with their customers.

Smartwatch is also more accessible than smartphone as it's easier and quicker to take a look at your wrist or roll your wrist over a sensor than pulling a phone out of your pocket or bag. These devices usually comes with 4G connectivity, Wi-Fi and GPRS and using these features with NFC, Bluetooth LE or geo-location based maps would make them more than ideal for location based advert and promotion information.

Take for instance, a shopper could be walking into a large shopping mall to get a pair of socks and the watch would vibrates to send him a notification. A quick glance at the watch would inform the person that his favourite brand of shoes is on sales in one of the stores. Payment for his purchases could be done with a quick tap on the sensor with his watch. Another shopper that had expressed an interest in getting a new television set through his browsing and search history will be able to receive an alert on his watch with a coupon for a special deal as he walked pass the eletronics store. All this done without the need of reaching into one's pocket or rummaging through one's bag to reach for their handsets.

While we're still at the early stages with the smartwatch technology, the smartwatch would be able to provide great opportunities for digital marketers to reach customers with more relevant advertising via a device that is permanently attached to the hand.