Alterian summit focuses on customer engagement

Attendees at Alterian's recent Engaging Times European Summit discussed how one-to-one engagement with consumers requires a radically new way of creating content and on-demand services.

Speakers at the event included Stan Rapp, chairman of Engauge; Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic; Prof 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 per cent of respondents agreed that customer engagement requires new ways of thinking, while 56 per cent 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 per cent of those surveyed said that linking online and offline marketing activities played a major role.

Of the successes the audience is seeing, 77 per cent believed that they are delivering personalised communications and when it came to social media, 81 per cent felt that they would be able to effectively utilise this emerging channel.

In his speech, 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 per cent 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 per cent said they will be using it to build brand advocacy and 31 per cent 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.

Eighty-five per cent of those surveyed said that website individualisation will be increasingly important or critical for success over the next couple of years.

The survey went further to explore budget that organisations 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 per cent of respondents expected it to increase.

When then asked where the focus would sit over the next year, 25 per cent of respondents expected to see a focus on social media and user communities, whereas 26 per cent would be seeing an increased focus on marketing analytics and 22 per cent would be increasing focus on their website.

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