By nickjohnson - August 7th, 2013

As part of the run up to the Incite Summit East, we asked our community to vote on the sessions we plan on running at the conference. We'll give more time and focus to the most important issues, to ensure the event is as valuable as possible.

As an added benefit, the voting gives us an insight into the most important issues for marketing and communications executives in the USA right now.

We pull the votes every month, and build up charts to share with you. At the bottom of this post are the votes from July. So, what did we find out this time?

Both marketers and communicators think that 'right time, right place' messaging is key

There is evidently an increasing awareness of the power of increased customer insight, and an acceptance of heightening demands from consumers for relevant, targeted messaging. In a world where customers are increasingly able to ignore traditional messaging, it's important for brands to deliver content and brand messaging that personally engages a consumer on a channel, and at a time that is right for them.

For brands to be able to deliver this level of targeted relevance, there's a considerable amount of internal changes to be made, and significant amounts of investment. Interestingly, there is little appetite from brands to talk about these more prosaic changes (see the position of 'desiloisation' and 'refashioning internal workflows' in the charts below).

Both groups give short shrift to portmanteau-based buzzwords like 'glocal' and 'SoLoMo'

SoLoMo was the buzzword of 2012, and appears to have had its moment in the sun. There was always a suspicion that it was more a chance to create a new portmanteau than it was an authentic marketing strategy that had potential.

As well as this, one could argue that the increasingly popular 'multi-channel'  and 'omnichannel' take the possibilities inherent in 'solomo' and broaden the horizons to incorporate yet more new outreach channels.

There's a significant synergy between marketing and communications priorities for the year ahead

Number one on both charts ('storytelling' for communicators, and 'unique customer experiences' for marketers) feed off the pressure on marcomms execs to deliver an increasingly engaging, relevant message to target audiences.

Individual sessions on targeting, multi-channel and measurement also feature highly for both groups.

The only obvious difference, in fact, is the higher priority for influencer management for communications executives. And this can perhaps be explained by the defensive utility of brand advocates - this 'defensive' function being unique to communicators and of little interest to marketing departments.

To learn more about the key priorities outlined above, please have a look at the Incite:Marketing and Incite:Communications Summits. Both take place in NYC on the 18th and 19th September.

At those events, you'll get proven best practice and exclusive insight from Chief Marketing and Communications Officers from some of the largest brands in the world, including Molson Coors, Hertz, Aflac, L'Oreal, Sears, KMart, Skype, Jockey International and many more.

How important are these key issues for you

Both groups care deeply about building unique customer experiences - and one can infer therefore, how one goes about collecting, synthesizing and leveraging new insight on consumers to deliver these new experiences.

Are the following marketing issues important to you

For the marketing-specific sessions, we see a slightly different set of priorities, with the main focus being on lean, precise marketing based on the increased amount of data a marketer can collect on their target audience.

chart3 (2)

Communications executives are still  most keen on storytelling, and also show a keen interest in how to leverage data and other customer insights to deliver more targeted messaging to the right people, in the right place, and at the right time.

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