Note: Image adapted from Serge Kij's photo on Flickr.

Stefan Tornquist, VP Research at Econsultancy, was our featured presented during a recent webinar. View the on-demand replay at any time. I interviewed Stefan (via email) about the webinar.

Tell us about your role at Econsultancy?

I've run research for Econsultancy in the Americas for five years or so. That involves building and executing a content plan to keep our subscribers up to speed, as well as creating research with partners like IBM, Adobe and Google.

I'm lucky because marketing touches so many parts of business and culture. You can't write about marketing technology without thinking about people, how we behave and what makes us tick. It's routinely fascinating, if that's not an oxymoron.

Most of my time is spent writing in a cave (it is literally a bunker in my house in Brooklyn), but occasionally come out for sunlight and speaking engagements.

What are you planning to cover during the webinar?

We're covering quite a bit of terrain, from the challenges of connecting to the modern consumer to looking at their needs and of course, addressing what marketers can do to satisfy those demands. We'll be using research and case studies to bring out these questions, and hopefully their answers.

Are there recently produced resources or research (from Econsultancy) related to the topic of the webinar?

I can't recall a time when so many of our resources were drawn into a single topic as they are now with customer experience (“CX”). Of course, that's a reflection of the scope of CX: it encompasses so much of what marketers are responsible for directly and can influence.

I think it may also be a sign of how digital marketing is maturing. If the last 10-15 years were about technology innovation, this next period is about putting it to use. We've got an almost miraculous set of tools to understand the customer, but most of our creativity has been wasted on mastering the next new thing. Now our attention and effort is being redirected away from the tech to putting it to use for people.

What’s the one thing marketers are NOT doing enough of?

In our research, the biggest discrepancy between what people want and what marketers think is important is information about their customer accounts. I think many of us forget that the data we collect on our customers can be important to them. They can find it stressful if they can't access it. Take the example of how credit card users pour through their year-end analysis. There's so much more that brands can do with customer data to serve and delight.

Give us one easy win that a marketer can do to make their website more engaging?

People connect with people, regardless of format, so put up a piece of content (e.g. video, blog post, anything really) that features real employees. Could be the CEO, but could also be front line folks.

What's important is that it doesn't come across like a puppet show with press release lingo and fake smiles. Talk about what works and what doesn't work. What keeps the leaders at the company awake at night, what they think the industry will look like and why it's important.

View the On-Demand Replay

Hope you were able to get a sense for what Stefan covered during the webinar. View the on-demand replay at any time (registration required).