The Marketing landscape has changed drastically over the last ten years. The emergence of dominant digital communication channels like the Internet and Mobile Telephony combined with the phenomenon called Social Media has only served to emphasize the challenges and opportunities that marketers face in the face of rapidly emerging trends and technologies.

Event Based Marketing in 2013

Let’s take a brief look at what Event-based Marketing (EBM) needs to contend with and what possible direction it needs to take in 2013:

The emergence of Real-time

Event-based campaigns have not become completely passé but are nearly there. Although campaigns that revolve around product / customer / organizational lifetime cycle events will continue to have residual value, it is marketers who respond fastest who can potentially deliver the most RoI. The multiplicity of channels has resulted in fragmentation of audiences’ attention to the extent that only those EBM systems that can respond in “real-time” and which can make the most of ephemeral opportunities can hope to sustain themselves in future.

The rise of Social Media

Social Media has evolved to the point where marketers can capture new customers, drive loyalty and enhance customer retention. All this is possible only if Ebm Systems have social media capabilities; all this is possible only if EBM systems can respond to “events” on social media real-time.

Social media can also be used to collect quantitative and qualitative data about both customers and prospects; this data can be “crunched” to define newer triggers for EBM.

Go Mobile

For banking, for shopping, for browsing the Internet, for reading, for paying bills, for catching up with work and for as many purposes for which there are “apps”, mobiles, especially, smartphones, are becoming the go-to devices. Digital Wallets and QR Codes have also extended the applicability of mobile phones. EBM Systems that can integrate mobile capabilities into their marketability programs can deliver highly specific content and enable faster response times.

Inbound Marketing

In the traditional marketing view-point it was the marketing team’s interactions with prospects and customers that counted towards building a bigger and more loyal customer database. Today, it is not just the Marketing department that markets. Every employee in HR, Sales, Customer Service, Finance etc who deals with customers, prospects and a brand audience is a potential marketer. These “inbound marketers” can find a potential marketing opportunity in every incoming interaction provided that the EBM systems are designed to capture every such interaction and farm event-based triggers from them.