A New Era Of Marketing

A new marketing era, long overdue, was heralded in when Social Media emerged as a real game changer. It put customers back at the centre of the organisation and gave marketers a new set of tools to listen to them and to encourage them to engage with the brand. A golden opportunity has emerged as organisations realise the possibilities of engaging with customers in new ways so they can become partners driving the business forwards. The Ladder Of Engagement makes it easy to nurture customers up to higher levels of involvement.

'Joined-up marketing' brings the old 'outbound marketing' (e.g. advertising, direct mail, telemarketing etc sending out messages) together with inbound marketing (where Social media brings conversations to the organisation). Integrating Inbound and Outbound with Online and Offline communications delivers higher impact and more cost effective 'joined-up marketing'.

Marketing communications has to be integrated for two reasons. Firstly, unintegrated databases cause many problems and complications as there is no single picture of the customer. Secondly, as communications morphes into customer experiences all communications needs to be integrated to deliver a consistent experience.

Amidst hyper competition this ladder helps to build a ring fence of protection around the precious customer. It also encourages customers, and even non- customers, to collaborate and create anything from better promotions to better processes to better products. This marketing utopia is the beginning of a new creative age in marketing. It is also a new era of collaborative co-creation, which moves marketing into a strategic position and earns its seat at the board.