Addemar recently sponsored the Relationship Marketing Congress. The day in a nutshell!

On May 20th, the RM Congress of Stichting Marketing took place. Theme: Conversion from lead to customer, categorized into innovation, cases and research. Beginning and end was always in the hands of a keynote speaker.

Keynote Frans Reichardt of Holy Cow taught the public that marketing is not just about the 4 P’s of Kotler, but about the P of Passion. The 4 p’s are the minimum requirements to stay afloat in the market in the first place. It is all about showing passion and giving love to your customer.

One topic was recurrent: Social Media. Everyone realizes that it is a phenomenon and that it will stay that way, but not everyone knows how to make money with it yet. Insites Consulting looked at Twitter specifically. Their idea is that social media is here to stay but that its shape can still change. Some outstanding figures that illustrate that a social medium such as Twitter is not widely spread yet and is still concentrated around some heavy users like with every phenomenon: 90% of the European tweets are done by 0.7% of the European population.

Another important lesson (from Leadfabric, amongst others): we evolve from a situation where companies sell, to one where customers buy. You should therefore adjust your sales strategy and change to a customer buying cycle. While doing that, the classic boundary between Sales and Marketing will fade.

Purely and only because of the turnout for certain speakers, email and website turned out to be far from dead. It is still a popular and thankful medium.

Finally Keynote Daniel Morel, - CEO Wunderman – finished the day with the conclusion that social media is big. And with that, the circle was round again.