Social media poses the greatest challenge to engaging customers today, according to a recent poll of more than 200 professional marketers.

Integrated marketing platform provider Alterian surveyed attendees at its recent Engaging Times Summit in Chicago about how to engage consumers in today's shifting marketing landscape.
 
Some 60% of the respondents agreed that personal one-to-one engagement with consumers requires a radically new way of creating content and on-demand services. The same percentage also agreed that existing techniques for understanding consumers' needs requires significant improvement.
 
"The engagement of so many individuals across social networks, blogs, and other online channels has meant that organizations need to increasingly treat consumers as individuals—both in order to recruit new customers and to retain existing ones," said Mike Fisher, Alterian's SVP of sales and marketing for the Americas. "Conversations can now spread across the web in seconds that can have both a dramatically positive or negative impact on a brand."
 
Asked which channel would have the most influence on the customer experience in the next year, 48% of respondents identified social media. But more than a quarter of respondents (28%) cited email as the channel delivering the greatest ROI, and 20% said that their organizations would make their greatest investments in email marketing in the coming year. 
 
Other findings of Alterian's poll:

• 46% of respondents identified strategy as the most important factor in defining marketing agencies' focus on customer engagement.
• 25% stated that the top obstacle to overcome in online marketing was the integration of online with database marketing and offline channels.
• The two largest challenges to customer engagement were identified as (1) an inability to assess or manage internal infrastructure and culture (25% of respondents said this) and (2) the difficulty of integrating the necessary technology (20%). 

About the data: The research study took place among more than 200 marketing professionals at Alterian’s Engaging Times Summit in August 2009.

 
https://www.alterian.com/