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From Event Marketing to Engagement Marketing

Anthony Miller, Global Strategic Director for Active Network, Events talks engagement. (As featured in the April newsletter).

With access to more information than ever, people are increasingly discerning in their brand selection. Businesses have a stark choice: engage or be passed by.

Imagine a world where the fundamental power to influence is shifting from the few to the many.  A world where a combination of social media, online communities, mobile technologies and live events is able to support a communications ecosystem capable of delivering the ultimate panacea for modern day marketing professionals, customer engagement.

This is the world we live in today, a world with more than five billion active cellular subscriptions, 600 million Facebook members and around 65 million tweets a day. Understanding this new media environment puts any marketer or business leader ahead of their competition and on the first step to harnessing the new rules of customer engagement.

It is no longer enough to send out one way messages. Brands need to engage in an active dialogue with their customers and encourage them to communicate directly and with each other.

Allowing customers to interact with each other creates a collaborative community providing them the power to influence and evolve a brand and providing a real sense of “ownership”, which in turn drives advocacy.

Customers expect to be personally engaged, listened to, involved and valued. This is an engaged customer and this is engagement marketing.

Although engagement marketing is not a new concept, the new global market place and the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies mean it is coming into its own.

Essentially true engagement demands the creation of a persistent mutually beneficial relationship between a brand and its audience through digital and live interaction. Engagement marketing supports traditional means of customer interaction, such as print media, events and meetings, with new digital tools that help maintain the conversation and tap into customers’ wants and needs. These tools include social media, online communities, mobile technologies, virtual events, webinars and email.

These new channels provide access to more data than ever and more ways to communicate. They allow business decisions to be based on behavioral data, enabling more targeted and personal messaging.

In terms of a live event, we can use the data gathered within a community or online discussion group to inform the content or even the need for the activity, maximising its value. This data about the attendees’ actions at an event can then be used to determine the next communication or interaction – perhaps a sales call, an invitation to a webinar or inclusion within a community activity and ultimately a conversion.

In our next feature we begin to explore how you can move your customers from engaged to enchanted... 

Anthony Miller
Global Strategic Director at Active Network, Events

Follow Anthony and the Active Network, Events team on Twitter: @ActiveEventsGuy