My Thoughts on the 2014 Forrester Forum

Recently, I attended the 2014 Forrester Forum for Marketing Leaders conference in San Francisco. While I’m not in a marketing role, I did learn that marketing is getting complicated! In this blog post, I’ll summarize my takeaways from the Forum. The following themes were present across the keynotes and sessions.

Beyond the Campaign

The main theme of the conference was "Beyond the Campaign" and the speakers frequently noted that marketing campaigns are a thing of the past. Customer "touchpoints," “experiences,” “engagement across multiple channels,” and “moments” are the ways marketers will connect in the future.

Age of the Customer

The "Age of Information" has led to the current era, one that is envisioned to last twenty years, which is referred to as the "Age of the Customer." All applications and content should become customer-centric, rather than product or service-centric.

The Importance of Robust and Insightful Data

Speakers talked a lot about metrics, analytics, and the insights that can be gleaned from data, which all helps marketers make decisions. Data and metrics will be the core of every decision that marketers make. In short, better data helps marketers be more informed and informed marketers make better decisions.

Engage with Customers In Context

Marketers must connectwith customers in meaningful ways, based on the particular situation or scenario: when they’re in your store, attending your event, or physically near your brand.

Personalization of Content and Experiences

Customers now expect you to know them on a personal basis. Since you only get a few seconds to engage with the customer, your interaction with them should be highly personalized. This also drives the need for real-time data.

Solutions Need to Work Together Seamlessly

Over and over speakers spoke of the need for marketers to engage with their customers on all these “touchpoints” in a seamless manner from the customer’s perspective. One quote was that marketers need to “bridge the gap between experiences and brand” and another was “mend the seams between the multiple touchpoints that customers have with brands."

Brand and Experience are Inseparable

Each interaction with customers and how the customer perceives their experiences defines your brand on a moment by moment basis.

Challenges Facing Marketers Today

Pictured: attendees had a lot of options to consider at Forrester Forum.

Marketers are faced with the great challenge of shifting their model. Why? Because they need to stay relevant and engage with their customers. Marketers have to engage with customers who are now digitally empowered, mobile, and bombarded with media.

Furthermore, they must do so on the customers’ terms and across multiple channels, which makes managing all these interactions difficult. Part of that difficulty occurs because marketers are using multiple solutions for these various “touchpoints,” which creates fragmented and siloed experiences for users.

This shift in how customers interact with brands is causing marketers to adapt. Updating the tools they use to interact with their customers is part of this adaptation process. Marketers must “pivot” to keep up with their customers.

A Unique Conference Concept: Marble Surveys

At most conferences and events, you’ll be given post-session surveys as you leave the event. The Forrester Forum used a technique that was rather clever. They placed marbles in jars at the back of the room. The marbles were three different colors. As you exited the session, you rated the speaker by the color of the marble you selected. This made it very easy to visually understand how the audience perceived the speaker’s session. All red meant not so good, yellow meant OK, and green meant great.

Conference Takeaways

Here are my ten takeaways from Forrester Forum:

1. In order to be successful, marketers need to highly personalize content
2. Marketers are looking for solutions that easily and seamlessly integrate with other solutions, like Salesforce, Marketo, etc.
3. Marketers should help "mend the seams between the multiple touchpoints that customers have with brands."
4. Marketers should look to connect and engage with customers in context
5. Marketers should streamline their processes around the customer
6. Marketers need solutions that provide informative combinations of metrics that help them make decisions
7. Tracking user behavior is critical
8. Solutions should help marketers seamlessly and easily turn data into decisions
9. In order to be competitive, marketers need to be obsessed with their customers
10. “Brand and experience is inseparable."

Summary

This was my first Marketing conference and I learned a lot. Forrester put on a top notch event. I met interesting people, listened to knowledgeable speakers, and left more informed than when I arrived. Now that we’ve got the information the challenge is to do something with it! What will you change as a result of this shift to a customer centric era? Share with us by using the Comments area below.