IBM is following the competition onto the data-driven marketing bandwagon with the introduction of new cloud services promising to provide a centralized way of tracking and acting upon buying patterns across online channels. The launch takes aim at one of the biggest challenges in the trade.

The proliferation of new avenues through which to communicate with consumers that occurred in recent years on the back of trends such as mobility and social media has proven a double-edged sword for marketers, creating more engagement opportunities on one hand but additional complexity on the other. That is adding more and more variables to the sales process, thereby making it increasingly difficult to see the complete picture.

As a result, marketers often gain only a partial understanding of cross-channel engagement scenarios, such as when a customer finds out about a product from a mobile ad and consults with their inner circle about whether to buy through social media before finally making the purchase on their desktop. With such deals quickly becoming the norm, IBM is extending organizations a hand in adapting to the new reality of the sales landscape in the form of the newly introduced Journey Analytics.

As the name implies, the service tracks how customers progress through the different stages of the conversion process across online channels and visualizes the patterns in that activity for marketers to easily understand. It’s a similar value proposition to what Salesforce.com Inc. is offering with its recently launched Engagement Studio, except IBM is selling the tools to act on that information in a separate package.

Journey Designer provides an environment for teams to collaborate on the creation of campaigns to address the buying patterns identified through the visual tracking interface, according to the company. The digital workbench comes integrated not only with its namesake analytics component but also other key parts of broader IBM’s cloud-based marketing suite, including its behavior mapping capabilities, which can help organizations dip deeper into how customers are reacting to content produced in Journey Designer across different channels.

That interoperability also extends to Commerce Insights, the latest addition to the bundle that debuted in conjunction with the Journey toolkit. The service uses predictive analytics to identify the factors behind the underperforming products and track other market conditions such as pricing changes from rivals to help merchandisers quickly react to changes in their business environment.

IBM sees a big market for its new services. Four out of five consumers surveyed for an internal study published on occasion of the launch said that brands don’t understand them, with only 35 percent saying that the messaging they release is relevant. But the company faces stiff competition from rivals such as Salesforce, which are no less determined to seize the opportunity.
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