Smarter Commerce Delivers Intelligence to CMOs

IBM continues to aim high with its digital marketing software, releasing some new products as part of the company's Smarter Commerce initiative.

The new software and services, announced during the Smarter Commerce Global Summit, is geared towards chief marketing officers (CMO) and offers them the ability to deliver personalized digital experiences to individual customers using mobile devices and social media channels. In other words, IBM wants to help CMOs stay on top of the latest Web trends.

Marketers will be able to use IBM's software and services to discover immediate intelligence about consumer shopping trends and act on this data based on customer preferences through marketing and promotional activities. Smarter Commerce services let marketers know information about specific consumer use tendencies, such as which devices they prefer to browse on compared to those they use to actually make purchases.

This initiative began as an attempt to help marketers capitalize on the growing trend of mobile device usage, which is expected to exceed desktop usage by 2014, by helping them capture a customer's device type and analyze how differently they respond to marketing campaigns on each one. This insight can help Web pros develop, market and execute personalized digital campaigns for every unique customer's specific mobile and tablet experience.

IBM is also offering a new Mobile Strategy Accelerator that companies can use to adopt and build a roadmap for establishing stronger relationships with customers through their mobile devices.

On the social front, IBM announced several features being added to its Smarter Commerce software and services designed to help marketers balance their current customer information with data gathered from their public social media profiles, including location and product interests. Such insights should help marketing teams create relevant promotions and deals which they can post on consumers' Facebook walls or forward them directly via Twitter.