Marketing Managers: 3 Guidelines For Engaging with Your Consumers on Wearables

As a marketer, the growing popularity of wearables and the recent release of the Apple Watch may have you asking how your integrated marketing strategy may be affected by this new trend. As an Integrated Marketing Communications graduate student at the Medill School at Northwestern University, I am always learning about how advertising and content must be personalized for each distinctive media types in order to be effective and stand out among competitors. I have come across two articles that have nicely outlined the current state of wearables and how marketers must react in order to connect with their customers.

Scott Amyx's article "How Will Your Company Wear BYOW" in Wired lays out how many different industries will be affected by the growing trend of wearables and how it will affect their product strategy. Executives need to be cognizant of "overcoming the complacency of current market success" and stay engaged with smart wearable tech. In order to do this, companies must first develop a matrix of available technologies and capabilities in order to better understand the competitive landscape. Then, they should evaluate their product's capabilities to learn how it can solve a business problem and consumer need in order to grab the attention of their customers. Finally it is essential that executives have a defensive and offensive strategy that allows for adaptation to the rapidly changing landscape.

Image Source: https://wtvox.com/2015/04/the-inception-of-wearables/

Furthermore, according the Content Marketing Institute's article "4 Ways Wearable Tech Could Change Your Marketing Strategy" by Erin Rodat-Savla, marketers must stay engaged with this market and experiment in order to strengthen their wearables expertise. One strategy to consider is making content more glanceable by narrowing down messages in order to make it more relevant and usable on this platform. Marketers should put themselves in the customer’s mindset and ask if this information is “just in time” and unique to this platform. They should also integrate experience with convenience by tapping into location and emotion. By combining the knowledge of customer location and emotion, marketers can utilize wearables data to solve specific problems that other platforms and competitors cannot.

Based on the insights of these two articles and my graduate studies in the Medill IMC program at Northwestern, I have 3 action items that you should consider when formulating your wearables strategy to engage consumers:

• Be short and unique – Create timely, contextual content that offers consumers something unique to their wearable device rather than similar to their smartphone or tablet. 

• Help consumers achieve their goals – Wearables are an opportunity for you to connect to the consumers' desire for information and self-improvement and offer them a way to interpret their health data into actions. For instance, if you are a shoe company, you could offer customers a coupon for a new pair of sneakers after they have walked a certain distance.

• Create more actionable segments – With more lifestyle data available on consumers, you can create more actionable segments based on behavioral metrics, such as targeting consumers that enjoy running or getting coffee at a certain time and cross-selling them products that complement their activities.

With the increasing consumer usage of wearables, it is important for marketers to always keep the consumers' needs in mind and provide them with unique, timely content. There will be an increasing influx of consumer lifestyle data and it is up to you as a marketer to sift through the clutter in order to gain insight and provide your consumers with benefits that cannot be gain from other media.

Thu Dang is double Wildcat who earned a B.A. in Economics and International Studies from Northwestern University and is currently pursuing a Masters in Integrated Marketing Communications at her alma mater. She is passionate about the health & wellness industry and has experience working at a healthcare communications agency. She hopes to continue marketing for a good cause after graduating in August 2015 and you can contact her through Twitter @tdang13 or LinkedIn.