The secrets to achieving customer intimacy and heightened marketing results were revealed at Australia’s premier marketing conference & exhibition, ADMA Forum, which has just taken place in Sydney
Fiona Noon, ADMA General Manager – Events said “this year’s ADMA Forum was about relationships and how to create deeper more intimate connections with your customers and with over 60 international and local presenters, what better place than Forum to learn and reinforce these skills”.“This year had more content than ever on the mobile and digital space and attendees were informed of how to leverage these technologies to create and maintain relationships,” Ms Noon added.
Questions answered included how can we lengthen customer engagement at each touch point? How close are we to measuring ROI at an individual customer level? How do we use emerging digital opportunities to deepen our relationships? And how can you utilise media measurement and data analytics and do it well.
The ADMA forum saw the launch of three very important pieces of research.
The first was the Consumer Insights Study 2008 where consumers were asked for their thoughts and feelings about direct to customer marketing and the value that they place on relationships with brands. The result is both a tracking study and a tool to measure the impacts of new and emerging technologies, cultural shifts and changing attitudes towards direct marketing.
The second was the ‘Environmental Guidelines for the Australian Marketing Industry’. This ‘Green Blueprint’ is designed to move marketers along a continuum of improvement in the conservation and sustainable management of natural resources and the reduction of pollutants such as greenhouse gas emissions.
And thirdly, the seven immutable principles of direct marketing were launched by Ian Kennedy on behalf of ADMA. For the past 6 months, ADMA has been conducting in-depth research globally to develop the seven immutable principles of marketing. The research holds good across all marketing channels including direct mail, voice, email, digital and direct response TV. The end result will be a suite of best practice guidelines for the marketing industry.
Some of the world’s most experienced direct marketers came to Sydney to share their insights on these topics and more such as:
• increased challenges in measuring results
• using customer knowledge to improve ROI
• how “media snacking” can impact media choice
• is social networking really driving acquisition?
• How to build both brand and relationships when consumers are in control.
Some of the inspirational keynote speakers included:
• Daniel Morel, Chairman and CEO, Wunderman Worldwide who spoke on social networking and consumers being the instigators for dialogue as opposed to advertisers.
• Ian Kennedy OAM, Chairman, Wunderman launched the seven immutable principles for marketing which will form the basis of a suite of best practice guidelines for the industry.
• Ken Burke, Chairman, Founder, & Chief Evangelist, MarketLive presented on social networking, RSS feeds and blogging.The conference programme was designed to help marketers sustain meaningful relationships and networking activities included speed networking, a cocktail party and conference delegate lunches.
The Exhibition proved successful with the most innovative exhibitors demonstrating the latest solutions in email marketing, mobile marketing, database management, promotional marketing, print and direct mail solutions, CRM, online and search marketing and much, much more.
The free seminar programme (free of charge for exhibition vistors) gained much interest, covering topics including the environment, privacy, data planning, top direct mail campaigns of 2007, email, search engine marketing and the future of mobile. The seminar on transpromo proved interesting to printers. Grant Stewart, managing director of Vectis, presented on leveraging the marketing power of transpromotional mail, and coming up with various examples of campaigns where transpromo had massively increased the response rate over standard direct mail activities. A major advocate of transpromo, Grant sees it as an area with huge potential, as marketers become aware of its existence. According to Grant, the new technologies coming on stream make transpromo a very attractive proposition as they drive down costs and drive up quality. ADMA Forum Sponsors included: Australia Post, Tequila, Geon, Veda Advantage, Acxiom, Quantium, Pacific Micromarketing, Interwoven, Mail Marketing Works, IncNet, CPI Group and Loaded Creative.
