CMO.com Highlights: Employee and Customer Engagement

Last week’s exclu­sives on CMO.com focused pri­mar­i­ly on the sub­ject of engage­ment for both employ­ees and cus­tomers. Employ­ee engage­ment is espe­cial­ly impor­tant when it comes to com­mu­ni­cat­ing impor­tant infor­ma­tion from the top down in an organ­i­sa­tion. Learn­ing how to engage employ­ees can help an organ­i­sa­tion to move for­ward at a much faster pace because every­one is on the same page. The week’s con­trib­u­tors also pro­vid­ed many help­ful strate­gies for increas­ing cus­tomer engage­ment, many from some unlike­ly places.

Katz Kiely, the Founder of Codis, began the week by dis­cussing the need for com­pa­nies to embrace a more gen­uine mod­el of com­mu­ni­ca­tion with their employ­ees. This is espe­cial­ly true when it comes to dri­ving change in an organ­i­sa­tion. Most peo­ple are change-resis­tant, and an organ­i­sa­tion made up of change-resis­tant peo­ple needs an approach to com­mu­ni­cat­ing that bypass­es people’s resis­tance. An infor­ma­tion-dri­ven approach doesn’t take into account the way the human brain is wired. Sto­ries engage more areas of the brain, which caus­es peo­ple to have an emo­tion­al response. Organ­i­sa­tions that want to com­mu­ni­cate change effec­tive­ly and engage employ­ee buy-in would do well to uti­lize sto­ry­telling in the communications.

CMO.com inter­viewed Tor-Arne Fos­s­er, Vice Pres­i­dent Head of Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing at Telenor, last week. The con­ver­sa­tion revolved around Telenor’s con­tin­ued pur­suit of engag­ing con­sumers at the right times with the right dig­i­tal chan­nels offer­ing per­son­alised con­tent. For Telenor, con­sumer engage­ment relies on iden­ti­fy­ing prob­lems that real cus­tomers are deal­ing with and cre­at­ing ser­vices and user expe­ri­ences that solve these prob­lems. Fos­s­er also dis­cussed the kind of com­pa­ny cul­ture an organ­i­sa­tion must devel­op to suc­ceed in dig­i­tal marketing.

What’s more engag­ing than themed enter­tain­ment? Klaus Som­mer Paulsen, CEO & Founder of Adven­ture­lab dis­cussed the ways in which mar­keters can uti­lize the prin­ci­ples that theme parks and oth­er attrac­tions use to engage their cus­tomers. These are the same prin­ci­ples that have been used for decades to cre­ate some­thing for peo­ple to expe­ri­ence. Paulsen gives sev­er­al prac­ti­cal tips on how to apply these prin­ci­ples to turn your busi­ness into an attraction.

Anoth­er area of engage­ment that mar­keters may not be aware of as a venue for mar­ket­ing poten­tial is online gam­ing. The Adobe Dig­i­tal Index (ADI) report­ed that the rise of gam­ing as a spec­ta­tor event through live stream­ing of games and social engage­ment has grown most sig­nif­i­cant­ly in Europe. ADI spokesman Adam Lloyd gave the exam­ple of one play­er who live streams his play­ing of Minecraft and uploads his videos to YouTube, pro­duc­ing more than 150,000 social inter­ac­tions a month. As online gam­ing con­tin­ues to grow, Lloyd chal­lenges mar­keters to uti­lize this space for more immer­sive cus­tomer engagement.

We’d love for you to engage with our exclu­sive con­tent at CMO.com and learn from some of the top mar­keters in the indus­try. Please let us know what you think.