Businesses can miss out on valuable opportunities to win customers and boost the bottom line without next-generation pattern-recognition technology in place. By automatically identifying patterns and acting on them, businesses can turn social chatter into profit, manage brand reputation in real time, recognise and act on new business opportunities and optimise multichannel customer engagement. Patterns bring meaning to customer interactions across all touch points, from websites to call centers, social networking sites to blogs. The human-friendly content found across limitless channels coupled with cutting-edge technology can empower organisations to depart from antiquated marketing approaches based on guesswork and embrace a new marketing strategy based on meaning.

Meaning Based Marketing (MBM) technologies glean insights from a whole array of customer interactions, delivering the best performing most accurate and relevant experiences to each individual. Through a unique pattern-matching and conceptual understanding at the individual rather than the aggregate level, MBM enables businesses to provide shoppers with a highly customised user experience based on the individual user’s profile and preferences.

Gone are the days of the blanket method, whereby hazy metrics pile customers together into different, arbitrary groups, based on categories as broad as age, income or gender. For the first time, customers will be able to communicate directly with businesses and inform the direction of their marketing strategies, drawing on history, real-time communication, cross-channel interactions, user generated content, customer behaviour and third-party content, in order to automate appropriate actions.

Indeed, cutting-edge technologies herald a new democratic system whereby customers are effectively placed in the driving seat of the very marketing tools that aim to attract their attention and pounds. For example, MBM can automatically identify the most compelling combination of web content and design by exposing different combinations of online content and layout to different visitors, identifying patterns in their actions and then recommending the optimal design. MBM can also extract relevant meaning from comments made on a social networking website or a blog, and proactively target a new customer segment.

For example, by deriving meaning from call centre recordings, blogs or social media messages, a sports equipment retailer can identify hype building around a sponsored marathon and launch a targeted campaign around this event. Or, by conducting real-time website experiments, an online bookseller may learn that a short plot synopsis is more likely to attract a book sale than a lengthy one, thereby boosting the company’s revenue.

The benefits are clear. In an industry where the competition is just one click away, it is more important than ever to make the end user’s experience as meaningful as possible, and turn site visitors into site customers. With marketers now able to spot patterns, across all customer interactions and act upon this understanding for a truly customer-centric approach to marketing at the individual rather than the aggregate level, their decisions can be driven by what actually sticks with their audience.

The possibilities are indeed endless. Armed with the knowledge needed to stay ahead of marketing changes and evolving customer behaviour, companies can be better positioned than ever to attract and retain customers while maximising revenue. Delivering the best possible outcome for customers and businesses alike, new generation technologies are revolutionising marketing, one customer at a time.