GET READY TO ENGAGE
‘Customer Engagement’, this year’s new catch phrase for marketers, seems to be sticking as a strategic approach for marketers. Why? Customer Engagement steps beyond traditional direct marketing as it looks to reduce the reliance on any one channel and coordinate two-way communication across all channels rather than just sending direct marketing campaigns. More than a buzz word, Customer Engagement is a new go-to market strategy and new service providers are emerging to deliver coordinated Customer Engagement services that challenge the traditional direct marketing engines that so many have grown to rely on. Changing the face of marketing from mass marketing to engagement with the individual – and its highly differentiated technology, will give customers a cost-effective, scalable and easy to use solution and direction to embrace.
Definitions of Customer Engagement
1. Well-established behaviours that demonstrate interactive multi-channel behavioural attachment and that reinforce commitment to the brand.
2. Engagement is the level of involvement, interaction, intimacy and influence that an individual has with a brand over time.
3. Customer Engagement enables organizations to more effectively respond to the fundamental changes in customer behaviour brought about by the Internet.
Marketing is Changing Because We Are Changing
The marketing industry is undergoing a dramatic transformation – from mass marketing to engagement with the individual and it is consumers who are driving this change and transforming the way that marketers market to them. Marketing used to be about shouting your message as loudly as possible at customers who, on the whole, did not question this method. Gradually, through the maturation of direct marketing, the emphasis shifted towards trying to talk to customers individually, but often without listening to them. The emergence of an era in which commerce and communication via the Internet became a central focus for business forced a more significant change in marketing. Customers now have a voice and therefore an active, creative role in consumerism. The rise in social media means customers can express their opinion about a product or service through email and websites, blogs and social networks, and also seek similar content from millions of other individuals who are now free to publish their preferences online. Consumers trust the opinions of strangers over even the largest brands and, as a result, have driven the most significant shift in marketing history.
Learning to Listen
Marketing has had to become two-way, and marketers must learn to listen and interact with, and not interrupt, their customers. The technology is there to help. With the new Social Media Monitoring (SMM) tools, marketers can, for the first time, listen to their market – indeed their individual customers – on a global scale. Market research has become instantaneous, engagement has become instantaneous – as soon as customers raise their hands through Twitter or a blog for example, or visit a
website, they can be addressed. Marketers can choose to interact with them on an individual level. So marketers need to learn to listen and engage with their customers, across multiple online and offline channels, in a transparent, timely and consistent manner.
A Focus on Engaging the Individual
As consumers decide to opt-out of invasive marketing, the volume of traditional mass brand marketing, which is not designed to engage the individual, is decreasing. The rise of social media, and the resulting need to engage both customers and influencers online, highlights that this is the time for a new integrated marketing, converging on interactivity and engagement to complement traditional marketing methods. The traditional direct marketing industry has become extremely skilful at understanding individual customer behaviour, messaging, getting attention, direct and database marketing, and integration with sales and contact centres for follow-up, and these lessons need to be applied to the online world and the efforts of both integrated. Marketing has typically operated through disparate departments; digital marketers caring only about online, the email marketers focusing on email, the brand marketers advertising, and the direct marketers on sending direct mail. Add to this contending product managers fighting over who owns the customer relationship and who can target them at any time through the various channels available, and it soon becomes apparent why the customer is tuning out of mass communications.
Engaging in the Conversation
The focus now is on engaging the individual, driving integration across marketing, and taking the individual from being an unknown prospect to an engaged customer and on to being a brand advocate. Marketing must become synonymous with customer engagement, and it is only the organisations which have the complete data and engagement process in place to orchestrate this transformation that will succeed.
Engagement Needs to Start Where Google Stops
Google, and search marketing in general, has changed the face of customer acquisition forever. It has made finding products a hyper-efficient marketplace, where increased money spent well really will increase traffic driven to a website. However, although Google and other search engines are highly effective at driving traffic to the website, it is here that their influence stops. When the customer arrives on the home page, if there is nothing compelling to engage them, or no process to move them on through the customer life cycle, they will simply hover over the back button and return with one click to the list of the site’s competitors detailed on Google. Marketing spend is wasted – regardless of the high volume of traffic figures the website team is keen to present. The requirement to have an operational capability which initiates a process of customer engagement with a prospect or customer once they arrive on the website is, therefore, a strategic business imperative.
Built for the Marketer by Marketers
The challenge, therefore, for marketers is to repeatedly engage with their prospects and customers, online and offline, and move them along the journey towards advocacy.