Atmospheric Marketing: Using Omnichannel Data to Envelope and Engage Customers 24/7

It’s a fact that omnipresent connectivity is changing customer assumptions and pushing businesses into a whole new dimension of atmospheric marketing. Marketers must now use omnichannel data to engage customers around the clock in an optimal customer experience.

Such digital-age marketing might look very alien to practitioners of the Mad Men generation, but it still has the same fundamental goal: getting the right message to the right individual at the right time. Before the Internet gave us persistent connectivity, most of a customer’s time was the wrong time. The difference today is that the right time can be any time.

The real-time marketing (RTM) concept and the commercial web both emerged in the mid-1990s (doubtless no coincidence), but it took the advent of Web 2.0 — a.k.a. social media — nearly a decade later to give RTM legs. Armed with increasingly sophisticated algorithms that could pull customer intelligence out of what wasn’t yet being called ‘Big Data,’ businesses could respond to customers in the moment and adapt marketing messaging accordingly.

Today, real-time response fails to impress customers, because they have come to expect no less. Since real-time is as fast as time gets, businesses now have to get ahead of customer needs. In this new marketing dimension, being responsive isn’t nearly enough; businesses must anticipate customer wants and desires, not just react to them. We refer to this new order as atmospheric marketing.

Meanwhile, meeting that baseline expectation of real-time performance hasn’t gotten any easier — quite the contrary. While customers may take your efforts for granted, leveraging expanding clouds of disparate and dynamic data in real time is a bigger and bigger challenge. The volume, velocity and variety of data continue to increase, and yet it all has to be aggregated, synthesized, harmonized, and turned into highly personalized customer insights in virtual real-time.

Leaders in diverse industries — including genealogy, healthcare, active wear, audio/infotainment systems, baby products and airline travel — don’t just react to customer situations and needs. They know today’s customers expect brands to learn from interaction histories and use this knowledge to come up with increasingly accurate recommendations.

Ensuring an organization’s data resources are working together creates a synergistic whole that is worth much, much more than the sum of its parts. Forward-thinking companies are winning the digital velocity race with atmospheric marketing technology, in particular tag management and customer data management platforms, which constantly collect variable and disparate data, and instantly transforms it into real-time, panoramic customer composites. Equipped with this persistent and dynamically updated 360-degree view, businesses can enhance the customer experience with an atmosphere that anticipates needs and knows what individual customers want before they do.

Consider a busy mountain resort, filled with eager skiers and snowboarders after a layer of fresh powder has just hit the ground. As one searches for a pair of ski goggles on a mobile device, you are able to target that potential customer with a discount offer. Or, for those using the resort’s mobile app during their visit, it’s possible to reach out via push notification to give with an offer for a free hot chocolate at the top of the mountain. The possibilities are truly endless when it comes to levering real-time insights and creating anticipatory customer delight.

Fast, cost-effective, and omnipresent delivery mechanisms are raising customer expectations to giddy heights and shrinking windows of marketing opportunity accordingly. Business life is now sustained by a pressurized atmosphere of cloud-enabled marketing technology that can sense sudden wind shifts, head off storms, and blanket customers 24/7 with omnichannel engagement.

This atmospheric marketing goes beyond real-time response. It is anticipatory marketing, maintaining situational awareness and predicting the needs, wants and desires of each individual customer.