Top 7 Reasons to Embrace IoT for Startups in 2023

Just a few years back Internet of Things (IoT) was a new term for people. 

Fast forward to today, IoT is everywhere, from households (Alexa, Google nest,..) to industries, the use of IoT increased. The number of connected devices in 2021 was 11.3 billion, which is expected to hit nearly 30 billion in 2030. 

Many tech giants started embracing IoT at a very early stage and reaped a lot of benefits. Startups and small businesses are slowly joining the IoT bandwagon. 

Want to know why you should embrace IoT in your startup? 

We’ll give you 7 strong and convincing reasons to bet big on IoT. 

Let’s get started. 

What is IoT?

Internet of Things is defined as the connection of physical objects which has sensors, the ability to process data, and software technology to transfer data or connect with other devices over the internet. 

Today we can connect any devices we name to the internet, from doorbells, and toothbrushes to ECG machines; we can connect anything. This shows the rise of IoT. 

Since the ’90s software industry has tried to connect objects to the internet, but the progress was slow due to many initial factors. Due to the exponential rise in internet connectivity speeds, the rise of IoT is on the top scale, and it is moving at a rapid pace. 

Rise of IoT

IoT is revolutionizing the tech industry and maximizing the use of internet capabilities. Every industry is trying to incorporate IoT into their business and seeing rapid growth. 

The development of IoT has become significantly cheaper from time to time, and usage also increased. Consumers started seeing the benefits of IoT and implemented them in their daily lives. Since 2019 the rise of IoT has been beyond limits, and consumers are starting to use it a lot.

Many B2B and B2C started to embrace IoT and scale from pilot to market fit in very less time.

Look at the rise of the internet of things (IoT) from 2019 as per the report from Statista.

7 Reasons why startups should embrace IoT

Startups want to make their mark in the competition. Every startup looks to accelerate its growth in different technologies.

There are numerous reasons for startups to embrace IoT. To help you better, we have listed out the top 7 reasons.

1. More customer engagement

Customer experience is the one word which changes the fate of many startups. Customers are now so precise about supporting brands; their top priority is better user experience. 

For example, if you have an e-commerce website, you can’t show an ad for a sneaker when the customer comes to buy a car accessory.

With the help of IoT, you can easily personalize the customer experience more than ever before. 

Integrating chatbots powered by IoT and AI will enhance the customer experience beyond limits. Resolving problems with this combination (AI and IoT) is easier for customer services. 

Also, IoT will provide startups with data to improve the way they treat customers.

Any issues regarding products or services are identified at the early stage by finding patterns and analyzing a lot of data and solving them.

When customer engagement and experience accelerate, the startup’s growth will be upscale. That’s why improving customer engagement is the top reason to embrace IoT in startups. 

2. Enhances marketing

Understanding the interest and behavior of your customers will make your marketing campaigns more successful. When you incorporate the IoT, you can find different patterns where the customers use the product and find an exact time to hit the ad.

Target marketing is made a lot of easy with the help of IoT. You can understand your exact customers and when is the right time to launch the new product or service. 

The use of IoT will make your marketing more precise, personalized and targeted. This helps you reache more potential customers.

3. Improves sales

Many companies struggle in post-sales areas where there will be a lot of unhappy customers.

This impacts the brand value. 

Embracing IoT can find patterns of product or service failure by analyzing a lot of data from other customers where the product fails. It can provide a precautionary measure to avoid failure, which will result in giving a top-notch customer experience.

IoT can also find the usage patterns of customers, which will help send customized emails for them to re-order the product or subscribe to the service.

4. Better connection between production and customers

When you have an IoT ecosystem, the reviews and data from CRM can be analyzed extensively and find the exact pain points of the customers.

When you have a list of features to be improved or added, you can directly hit the production team and make your product user-ready, rather than changing the marketing strategies or any other, which is unnecessary. 

In addition, the IoT ecosystem will provide the software development team with improved efficiency of development by providing priority factors in development phases and modulus. 

5. Omnichannel support

Omnichannel support is increasing the sales of every business nowadays. The IoT-enabled ecosystem will harvest a lot of data by embedding many channels at one point. 

You can enhance the ability of omnichannel with IoT. E-commerce websites can use the improved IoT-enabled omnichannel support to find the never-ending stock channel and the buying section. 

Many warehouses are enabled with IoT to find the exact status of the stocks. Omnichannel support with IoT will save a lot of time and resources. 

6. Improve efficiency and productivity

Implementing IoT at the employee level gives many benefits to startups. Apart from improving sales, CX and marketing, startups can find how much time is required to complete a work.

It will be more helpful when the employees are working remotely; you can have a lot of data on time tracking, productivity and efficiency. This helps in getting prepared for the next iteration or project more effectively.

With IoT, you can effectively manage your team from anywhere in the world.

Here are some tips for managing your remote team while you incorporate IoT

7. Asset management

Embracing IoT in startups helps in improving regulatory maintenance, mitigation of risk, and monitoring of assets on any device from any place. This will result in effective management of available resources while scaling.

Benefits of IoT

There are a lot of benefits proving you can’t avoid IoT when you have a startup. 

Benefits of incorporating IoT in startups

• Data-driven business insights
• Immediate knowledge 
• Low operating costs
• Enhanced workplace safety
• Deep analyzing of customer behavior
• Improved business models
• Stand out from competitors
• Real-time analysis
• More business opportunities
• Better customer experience

Popular Use cases

• IoT-based business automation
• IoT-based quality control and management
• Predictive maintenance
• Location tracking
• Remote control of assets

The best use case of IoT is Coco-Cola using the digital vending machine connected to the internet to understand their customers’ buying behavior and preferences. 

Bank of America used IoT-enabled microphone Bluetooth devices in call centre employees to find the productivity drop in their team. This may sound illegal, but they performed it in 2013 to find some patterns.

Final thoughts

The flexibility IoT offers to startups is immense. Users are well aware of IoT and expect startups to incorporate it.

Before you go with IoT, you need to understand the safety measures that should be taken. Also, many emerging startups fail to incorporate IoT when they don’t have a proper strategy to embrace IoT. 

You can hire an IoT expert, or you can do what most choose to do – hiring third-party product development companies to implement IoT.

The pace at which the technology world changes is rapid, and startups need to cope with it to succeed in the long run.