My team found this clip on YouTube that does a great job of illustrating the challenges marketing faces as customers tune out to listening to your message and seek a more interactive relationship.
In this clip, the advertiser continues to espouse their marketing messages while the consumer is tuning out and expressing frustration that they are not being listened to. This was the Web 1.0, Marketing 1.0 world. Marketers focused their energy on communicating their message to their target demographics in a passive way hoping consumers/prospects would hear their message (impressions) and eventually buy their product or service.
In today’s Web 2.0, connected, social networking world customers expect more. They expect to be engaged with the brand in an interactive manner. They want the brand to listen to them and have a dialog that is relevant to their interest and needs.
In fact, Brian Haven of Forrester published a report: Marketing’s New Key Metric: Engagement, August 8, 2007 (http://forrester.com/Research/Document/0,7211,42124,00.html). In case you don’t have access here is the executive summary:
The marketing funnel is a broken metaphor that overlooks the complexity social media introduces into the buying process. As consumers' trust in traditional media diminishes, marketers need a new approach. We propose a new metric, engagement, that includes four components: involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence. Each of these is built from data collected from online and offline data sources. Using engagement, you get a more holistic appreciation of your customers' actions, recognizing that value comes not just from transactions but also from actions people take to influence others. Once engagement takes hold of marketing, marketing messages will become conversations, and dollars will shift from media buying to customer understanding.
Companies are moving from passive loyalty measurement to active loyalty improvement programs. This includes moving from your passive website content that attempts to communicate to your target audience, to a more active interactive dialog that engages your target audience in co-creation, service improvements, and increased referral behavior. Marketing metrics such as “impressions” are not as relevant in today’s market as evaluating how engaged your customers are through active dialog and referral rates.
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