Last Tuesday marked the start of our two day Engaging Times summit – a great day of conversations and presentations on how engagement is transforming the marketing discipline.

Discussions covered topics ranging from the impact of social media on engagement to building online engagement roadmaps but all agreed on one thing – engagement is the future of marketing.

Marketing icon Stan Rapp, set the tone in this morning’s keynote chastising businesses for the trillions of dollars spent in the last century on advertising (much of it on 30 second SuperBowl commercials) – something he described as “the most wasteful practice in business”.

To frame the importance of the event, Rapp went on to observe that “if your competitors are here you need to pay attention. If they’re not you need to pay attention because this is a huge opportunity for you.”

For many attendees, the big question was how to better understand and analyze online data on customers and integrate with offline information without being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data.

How do you make this intelligence a marketing weapon?

The summit was designed to stimulate discussion and challenge marketing conventions and the panel debate on ‘Roadmaps For Online Engagement’ brought some fascinating conversations to the fore.

The agencies that formed the panel are some of the most forward thinking in the market and were acutely aware that for many consumers the web is increasingly the only way that they interact with brands.

A whole generation of customers will never want to engage any other way.

This can be terrifying, but also presents a huge opportunity for growth and innovation. People will make mistakes, but with real-time data and analytics available those mistakes can be quickly identified and acted upon.

When campaigns were only measured and monitored monthly or quarterly, mistakes could be disastrous.

We are truly moving to a place where a one-size-fits-all approach to marketing is no longer acceptable. Businesses cannot continually broadcast their brand messages to consumers and ignore their preference. If you don’t start listening, engaging and responding one of your competitors will.

While everyone recognizes the importance of engagement, one thing the Summit has made clear is that the fundamentals of good marketing remain – a clear understanding of both the marketing objectives will help the business deliver against them.

Data analytics give marketers more power than ever, not only in terms of delivering clear ROI, but also in enabling organizations to better analyze and adapt their campaigns to target the right audience.

It’s no longer satisfactory to be able to say ‘I know my campaign was successful’. You need to know exactly where it was successful and prove that the right customers took the right kind of action as a result of your communications. But it’s about more than just analytics. Many of the tools we discussed today demonstrated that it’s possible to test hundreds of different customer messages in a fraction of the time at a fraction of the cost that it would have two years ago.

This is the ammunition businesses need to make campaigns better targeted and ultimately more likely to drive sales. The potential is huge. There is no brand or product that cannot be positively impacted by an effective online marketing campaign.

Marketers need to heed the call to action and arm their businesses with the tools to reach customers in the most effective way possible. And that probably isn’t through a million dollar SuperBowl commercials…

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