The Internet of Things is generating enormous, and enormously increasing, amounts of data, and even more so the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) -- making this the perfect time to position your analytics-driven business as the owner of a marketing category you create yourself.

In a recent post I talked about why this is the perfect time for your business to create and own its Internet of Things (IoT) marketing category.  This morning I came across a post by John Fruehe on Forbes that, although it dates to 2015, expounds on an IoT concept that is no doubt timeless: The Internet of Things is actually more about data than it is about things.

Which got me thinking, again, about how the projected growth of the IoT over the next couple of years presents amazing opportunities to create and own marketing categories for your business. These opportunities, as Fruehe suggests, won't be limited to just IoT connected devices, though. In particular, companies that can offer services or tools to perform analytics on the mind-bendingly vast quantities of data being generated by the Internet of Things should be sitting pretty if they can act now with their marketing to capitalize on nascent analytics categories.

The recently-released Industrial Analytics Report 2016/17, conducted by the German firm IoT Analytics GmbH, provide the numbers that back this assertion up. It's a free download and well worth your time if your business is involved in IoT or Big Data analytics. What I'll give you here is just a taste, along with some thoughts about why this is great for your marketing... but do go and grab it if you're at all interested.

The rise of industrial analytics, as envisioned by the report, is driven by the confluence of the enormous amounts of data generated by industrial IoT devices with the advances in analytics necessary to make sense of it all. Of course, industrial analytics in some form or other has been around a very long time. What's changing now, driven by the IoT and better analytical tools, are both the real-time nature and the growing adoption of Industrial Analytics across industry verticals. Which makes great sense, of course. A single factory might have thousands of IIoT devices generating a constant stream of data. All of that data is useless without powerful analytics to make sense of it -- and ongoing advances in machine learning, AI, and other technologies that can be brought to bear on this problem are making the data-driven promises of analytics a reality sooner rather than later.

That said, current adoption rates are still very low -- but planned adoption rates over the next five years are extremely high. Consider this graph from the report:

If we can assume that the businesses who believe that analytics are crucial for their business will adopt and implement those analytics (not all will, of course), we're looking at a growth rate of 360% over the next five years. That's an amazing planned adoption rate. 

The report doesn't stop there, however. Further down, the kinds of  analytics technologies that companies are thinking about adopting over the next five years is broken out in more detail:

To save you the math, industry expects no less than five of those technologies to have a greater than or equal to 100% growth in importance to them over the next five years. Cognitive analytics leads the pack with a 188% growth rate here, but the others are not far behind.

These two graphs together present a compelling argument as to why now is the time to start creating and owning your marketing category if you have an analytics offering -- and if your business involves anything to do with predictive analytics, AI, event analytics, or cognitive analytics, I fully expect you can own the whole world within five years if you move now with your marketing. The secret, as I've discussed before, is to be first. That's only going to get progressively harder as the adoption rates for industrial IoT and attendent analytics climbs over the coming years, though, so don't wait for long.

Do what you have to do now. Get your marketing strategies in place, and then implement those strategies. Don't be last -- be first.

Final Thoughts:

If you're at all interested in this kind of thing, here's the link one more time to download the Industrial Analytics Report 2016/17. Have I mentioned it's free?

Have an interesting analytics offering and want a little extra insight onto how you can more easily own your IoT vertical, and why now is the time to do so? 

Click on image to the left and you can enjoy a free video on those very topics, as well as download The Why and the How: Owning Your IoT Vertical to find out 

• Where companies are ready for IoT sales

• Why now is the critical time to get in front of those companies

• How to differentiate your company from other IoT companies

• How you can own your IoT marketing vertical

... and more.

Have I mentioned it's free? 

Click on the image at left, or see it all right here: