This week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of the Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of How Marketing Can Power Engagement: Using Analytics to Deepen Customer Relationships. We assembled a great panel to give us their perspective on this topic: Sawti Sinha, the Global Director of Solutions Marketing for SAP; Bob Gilbreath, the Co-Founder and President of Ahalogy; and Kevin Poe, the Vice President of Global Consulting at Experian Decision Analytics. This webinar was also sponsored by SAP.
Swati presented a view on how analytics can deepen customer relationships. One of her points really resonated with me: The first step to engaging consumers more deeply is being able to generate deep insights about them in real time. The devil really is in the details for most of us and it revolves around three major areas that she outlined: 1) How to analyze massive amounts of data from multiple different sources; 2) to use that data to create a 360-degree view of each consumer and 3) to be able to act on these insights in real time. She also presented two case studies that helped unlock how other organization leverage analytics to get closer to their customers.
Kevin took over after Swati and talked about the challenges that prevent a great customer experience and how to get around them. Kevin highlighted four major challenges we all face in creating a great customer experience: 1) lack of channel integration (this means channels like email, twitter, CRM don't automatically sync up); 2) an internal view of the customer experience that may not be backed up by real research; 3) an over reliance on technology or automation and; 4) unclear ownership in each organization, which may be why you are starting to see titles like Chief Customer Officer.
Bob then finished off the presentations with some research that his company did on Pinterest and how that impacted the customer experience. The study was commissioned because Pinterest has been notoriously difficult for big brands to crack. The X factor is that it takes a high quantity of quality content. Their analysis confirms that the majority of engagement goes to a minority of content (read 80/20 rule). Bottom line you have to work hard to win on Pinterest with the right content but if you do the reward can be quite large.
Now, if you have ever been on a Social Media Today webinar before, you know they are very "participant-driven" and we love to ask your questions of our panelists. Some of the questions we covered this time were: How do you convince senior management that the customer experience is important? How do you make a business case? What types of returns can you see and where in the organization?
If that piqued your interest, you will want to hear the replay of this webinar or review the slides from this webinar. Otherwise we hope you will join us on another Social Media Today webinar! The next webinar is on Marketing Automation: Keeping Up with the Digital Transformation of Marketing, sign up for it or you can view the schedule of upcoming webinars here.