Customer engagement is key to brand survival

London event discovers customer engagement is key to brand survival

London – 08 February 2010 – Alterian (LSE:ALN) held its inaugural Engaging Times European Summit in London last week, where attendees discussed how personal, one-to-one engagement with consumers requires a radically new way of creating content and on demand services.  The event was attended by more than 400 marketing heads and decision makers, and a line up of marketing speakers including: Stan Rapp, Chairman of Engauge; Will Whitehorn, President of Virgin Galactic; Professor Michael Hulme, Institute of Advanced Study at Lancaster University and Andrew Finlayson, Channel Solution Development Manager at AstraZeneca.

According to a survey conducted at the event, 87% of respondents agreed that customer engagement requires new ways of thinking while 56% of respondents thought their current website was adequate but could do better when engaging with customers.

All of the speakers explored how customer engagement and social media are now key to marketing in the 21st century while the survey explored the challenges faced by marketers in the audience. When asked what the greatest individual challenge is to achieving customer engagement 35% of those surveyed said that linking online and offline marketing activities played a major role. Of the successes the audience is seeing 77% believed that they are currently delivering personalised communications and when it came to social media, 81% felt that they would be able to effectively utilise this emerging channel.

In his speech Stan Rapp explored how social media is essential to customer engagement and discussed how the ‘awesome power of direct marketing’ still applied in a 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 are utilising the power of social media, 36% said they will be using it to build brand advocacy and 31% would be using it primarily as a lead generation and business development tool. As well as social media, other areas of online interaction featured highly in the focus of marketers. 85% of those surveyed said that website individualisation will be increasingly important or critical for success over the next 1-2 years.

David Eldridge, CEO of Alterian said of the survey and event, “We consider the Engaging Times Summit to be a great success. The issues explored show how marketing as we currently know it is dead and the results of the event survey show much of the market agrees with us. The halcyon days of mass mailings, brochure-ware websites and email blasts are now well and truly finished. The key to marketing in the 21st century is individualisation – engaging with customers and prospects on a one to one basis with targeted marketing communications.

The technology to effectively engage with customers has been around for some time but the rise of social media over the last year or so has rapidly sped this process up. It is clear from the feedback we had at the event and the results of this survey that marketers realise that the difference between brands that survive and brands that don’t will be their ability to effectively engage with their audiences both online and offline.”

Event attendees included Tim Burge, Consultancy Director from Rapp. Burge said of the day “Events like this are exactly what the marketing industry needs to refocus and reinvent itself. At RAPP, we’ve partnered with Alterian for many years and data-driven customer engagement is at the heart of our strategy. From listening to what the great speakers had to say about how they conduct business, it’s clear that this approach is exactly what’s needed to deliver value to our clients.”

The survey went further to explore budget that organizations think they will be in a position to use for customer engagement over the coming year. When asked how they expect their budget to change over the next 12 months 33% of respondents expected it to increase. When then asked where the focus would sit over the next year, 25% of respondents expected to see a focus on social media and user communities, whereas 26% would be seeing an increased focus on marketing analytics and 22% would be increasing focus on their website.

Eldridge continues, “Following the turbulent last 18 months, it is encouraging to see that marketing budgets are on the increase. What is more encouraging is to see that people are taking social media seriously as a channel through which to engage with customers. It must be remembered, however, that engagement is a two way process. Brands must listen to customers as well as talk to them and businesses must invest time and budget listening to stay abreast of conversations and respond to customers and prospects – whether their conversations are positive or negative. Engaging with customers on a one-to-one basis is increasingly critical as marketers need to find a way for their brand or product to appeal to the individual.”

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About Alterian
Alterian (LSE: ALN) empowers organizations to create relevant, effective and engaging experiences with their audience that help build value and reinforce commitment to their brand, through the use of the Alterian Integrated Marketing Platform. Alterian drives the transformation of marketing and communications, making it practical and cost-effective for companies to orchestrate multichannel engagement with the individual.
Alterian’s unprecedented integration of analytics, content and execution through industry leading tools, such as the Dynamic Messenger email platform, SM2 Social Media Monitoring platform and the award winning Content Management solutions, enables companies to build integrated communication strategies which create a true picture of the individual.
Alterian works with marketing services partners, system integrators and agencies who recognize the need to plan and deliver coordinated customer engagement services in partnership with their clients. For more information about Alterian, products within the Alterian Integrated Marketing Platform or Alterian’s Partner Network, visit www.alterian.com or the Alterian blog at www.engagingtimes.com.