Is Client Engagement the next frontier in enterprise marketing??

I often wondered why we don’t have a lot more marketing managers in service sector firms. Don't they want to understand the needs and wants of their customers or the pulse of the market or the trends of the industry. Initially, thought it as more of the stage of evolution of the industry. While the manufacturing industry has evolved for more than a century, the service industry, especially TMT (Tech, Media and Telecom) have been in existence for less than three decades. However, it turned out to be much deeper than I thought.

Every marketers aim is to bring in new customers, grow their lifetime value and convert them into brand advocates who can influence their network to become new customers. However, today’s constantly-connected world of digital, social and mobile has changed the way customers behave— and, consequently, how brands need to speak to their customers and prospects. As brands evolve, they’re learning that engagement is the critical next step. If they’ve not already started, brands are starting to shift from an era of mass marketing and advertising—where we talk at people for a single moment in time—to an era of engagement marketing where we begin to take time to learn more about our customers on a personal, individual level and engage with them over a lifetime. And it is this engagement level where service sector brands have taken a leapfrogged growth over conventional products firms.

Engagement marketing is more than a series of transactions or click-through rates, it means building a real individual relationship, floor by floor, continuously over time, seamlessly across all of the channels and devices they use. It means paying attention to your customer and observing what they do, learning what they like, learning what they don’t like and guiding a journey that helps them get where they want to go. Your approach and enthusiasm for your relationships with customers should channel the same approach and feelings you have when interacting with a friend in your personal life. In a B2B scenario, engagement marketing is way easier to implement as you have limited number of customers, easier accessibility to their preferences and a dedicated team, however, when the channel is your soul medium of client interaction, then chances are that your customer will see you as a friend that is difficult to get a hold of, or is always talking about themselves, or is always stereotyping you based on just a few facts? So, plain-jane customer segmentation approach may not work.

So how to initiate customer engagement for your brand and the answer is simple; direct interactions with clients. While other departments can also provide insight, nothing is quite as valuable as direct feedback from customers using your products. Brands can now better track these insights and interactions across multiple channels thanks to the growth of marketing technology.

I think, ultimately, this will become the new basis of competition. It used to be that firms competed on price—then, they competed on brand awareness—then, they started competing on experience (think, “my visit to Big Bazaar today”). But, now as customers increasingly want companies to get to know them and continue to advance the relationship, they will choose brands (and more specifically, people at those brands) that engage with them most effectively. Those companies will win, and the others will lose.

Just my 2 cents.