Innovate and Connect: Mastering Customer Engagement

Truly community-focused engagement represents a bold departure from traditional, formulaic marketing approaches by embracing authenticity, storytelling, and creativity to build deeper, more meaningful engagement with customers.In an era where there are so many brands fighting for attention – we will look at approaches where less “broadcast” and more connections can be more effective. We will explore how we as marketers can rewrite the standard playbook, allowing space for genuine customer voices, and indeed to learn more from them as we evolve our products.

Oxford Nanopore develops molecular sensing technology. We believe in the power of the community, where its participants have a genuine, collective interest in advancing scientific discovery, and we can provide opportunities for their stories to be amplified. We will explore the example of the annual summit London Calling. It was created more than 10 years ago with an aim to provide a platform where scientists could share their research in-person - making space for networking and customer collaborations. It expanded to include both virtual and onsite elements with a mixture of online tutorials, plenaries, breakouts, and posters. It now attracts >5,000 registrants from over 100 countries. We continue to be delighted that researchers are keen to present their work on this stage and believe that it may be the only scientific conference that speakers get to choose their own walk on music! This talk will share the impact that this has had on our customer relationships, and how this helps provide genuine customer advocacy.

Traditional marketing funnels can no longer capture the complexity of today’s B2B buying journeys, where AI is fundamentally reshaping how buyers search, engage, and make decisions. As more of the buying process shifts to digital and off-site interactions, direct brand-to-prospect connections are diminishing. What if we could harness the power of AI to bridge that gap and create deeper, more meaningful engagement?

Marketing thinks sales ignores leads, while sales see marketing’s leads as weak. This disconnect hurts revenue and customer experience. What if they aligned goals and worked together to drive stronger results for the business and customers?

In this session, Annabel Sedgwick and Alex Rowthorn will explore how small biotech companies can leverage network analysis and Everett Rogers’ Diffusion Theory of Innovation (1962) to identify key opinion leaders and early adopters within scientific research communities. Using a hypothetical case study focused on a biotech company offering an innovative solution for preserving gut microbiota samples for clinical trials, the session will demonstrate how to map and analyse networks of scientific publications and collaborations.

Attendees will gain practical insights into constructing and analysing co-authorship networks, identifying influencers based on centrality metrics, and applying these insights to develop targeted marketing strategies. The session will include a live demonstration of network analysis techniques, showcasing how to pinpoint individuals and clusters most likely to drive the early adoption of new technologies in niche scientific fields. This session is designed for professionals looking to enhance their marketing strategies with data-driven approaches tailored to complex and specialised markets.