Have you seen The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook?

This comprehensive and practical guide to the latest ideas in customer-focused marketing hands you over 200 packed pages of strategy, best practices, do's and don'ts, practical know-how, facts and figures, and ideas to optimise your marketing strategy, boost sales, market share, increase ROI and profit.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)

Engagement seen as key to brand survival

At the summit, marketing experts discussed how personal, one-to-one engagement with consumers requires a radically new way of creating content and on-demand services. The survey found that 87% of marketers felt that customer engagement requires new ways of thinking while 56% felt that their current web site was "adequate, but could do better" when engaging with customers.

All of the speakers explored how customer engagement and social media are now critical to marketing in the 21st century, and the survey explored the challenges faced by marketers today. When asked about the greatest individual challenge to achieving customer engagement, 35% said that linking online and offline marketing activities played a major role.

Some 77% of marketers believed that they were already delivering personalised communications and, when it came to social media, 81% felt that they would be able to effectively use this emerging channel.

Stan Rapp, chairman for Engauge, explained how social media has become essential to customer engagement, and discussed how the "awesome power of direct marketing" still applies even in the digital age. The results of the live survey, which found that 80% ranked the importance of social media to the overall marketing mix as increasingly important or critical to success, showed that those attending the event agreed.

For the majority of those that were already taking advantage of social media, 36% said they would be using it to build brand advocacy and 31% said they would be using it primarily as a lead generation and business development tool.

Apart from social media, other areas of online interaction featured highly in the focus of marketers, as 85% of those surveyed said that web site individualisation (personalisation) would be increasingly important or critical for success over the coming two years.

When asked how they expected their marketing budget to change over the following 12 months, 33% expected it to increase. And, when then asked where the focus would lie over the next year, 25% expected to see a focus on social media and user communities, while 26% expected an increased focus on marketing analytics, and 22% expected an increasing focus on their web site.

The technology to effectively engage with customers has been around for some time but the rise of social media has sped up the process significantly, and it is clear from the survey that many marketers have realised that a brand's survival will depend on its ability to effectively engage its audience, both online and offline.

David Eldridge, CEO for Alterian, concluded: "The halcyon days of mass mailings, brochure-ware web sites, and email blasts are now well and truly over. The key to marketing in the 21st century will be individualisation - engaging with customers and prospects on a one-to-one basis with targeted marketing communications."

Have you seen The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook?

This comprehensive and practical guide to the latest ideas in customer-focused marketing hands you over 200 packed pages of strategy, best practices, do's and don'ts, practical know-how, facts and figures, and ideas to optimise your marketing strategy, boost sales, market share, increase ROI and profit.

Learn the insider's tricks and techniques to turn every customers into a 'super spreader' for your brand. It's better than free advertising. Once you start this ball rolling, your brand can grow rapidly through word-of-mouth, advocacy, influencers, and customer loyalty. Super-charge your company's marketing strategy, build up your market share, and make more sales through repeat business and customer loyalty.

Find out what works - and what doesn't - and who's succeeded, and how they did it. See how the world's top brands keep their competitive edge against all odds.

The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook walks you step-by-step through the techniques, metrics, reporting, analysis, marketing models, technologies, tools and innovations for successful marketing strategies - both traditional and emerging - with expert guidance from thought leaders in every major market. Find out the best ways to gather, analyse, and act on customer data to increase profitability, build your brand, empower your customers, beat the competition, reduce churn, and increase customer profitability. This is a marketing book you simply can't afford to be without.

This book aims to hand you all the facts, figures and research data you need for the best decisions for a more profitable, more engaging marketing strategy. It also highlights all the facts, forecasts and trends identified by our experts from the global Marketing Factbook's vast database of market data, news, studies, research and articles, and presents you with an invaluable library of ideas and practical support you can call upon at will.

With The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook at your side, you'll have instant access to a true goldmine of easily adaptable and up-to-date strategies, walk-throughs, trends, research and market data, plus all the supporting arguments you need to build a solid, profitable marketing strategy.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)