Real-time marketing is the latest form of business to customer process wherein brands engage their current and potential customers through various product placements and online content (like ?ÛÏmeme?Û) relevant to a certain current event. Today, various symposiums are held to promote this new trend of advertising to businesses. Last February, Twitter hosted an event at the Live Studio in London, wherein leading brands in the United Kingdom attended various seminars and workshops to learn the proper strategy and tone to use.
However, Adage.com notes that the brand infrastructure is not conducive to the demands of real-time marketing, including immediacy and relevance. In this article, we’ll give you some useful tips on how you can make real-time marketing work for you.
Choosing an inbound marketing solution
Depending on the nature of your business, you must choose an inbound marketing solution to take care of all the enterprise requirements. Take note that flexibility is the key here, as your real-time marketing strategy develops further with new trends.
With technology and methodology, ensure that your preferred solution must meet and address the needs of real-time marketing for an efficient analyzing of message data, interpreting Big Data insights, and incorporating customer expectations and sessions. Whether your preferred solution is the employment of social media or TV advertisements, plotting this information in a graph or chart ensures your ability to come up with the best offers or messages to deliver satisfaction.
Don’t sacrifice originality over speed
With immediacy being a pivotal aspect of real-time marketing, some marketers sacrifice the originality and quality of their services. In the words of Jenn Deering Davis from Marketing Profs, ?ÛÏbrands still must maintain a sense of authentic identity and post appropriate messages.?Û You must only engage in a conversation where your label would benefit in terms of personality and relevance.
A prime example that Davis cited is last year’s Oscars, wherein popular beer brand Stella Artoisposted a series of tweets showing the name of the winners engraved on a glass of beer. While the brand was successful in terms of timing and speed, Davis said that the tweets didn’t add any significance to the conversation and its customer base.
Understand the value of customer-centric content
At any event, ensure that your customers are focused to your campaign. Remember that real-time marketing isn’t entirely different from any marketing strategies, so think about what matters to your clientele and build content that revolves around it.
On Twitter, Let’s Get Wise (@letsgetwise) shared the plans of Coca-Cola in unlocking the consumer potential in the upcoming World Cup. Coke’s Head of Assets and Experiential Paul Dwan revealed that the company is partnering with blog site Tumblr to create a face collage of the fans. The mosaic will be revealed in the form of a flag during the opening ceremony of the event in Brazil. The technique shows how the popular beverage company gives importance to their customers, making them the main attraction of their campaign.
Create authentic outbound stories
Despite the abundance of the real-time interactions across Facebook and Twitter, some of the content developed for these platforms are deemed to rest in a ‘social silo,’ or simply put into waste. To address this challenge, two aspects must be considered: aptitude and attitude.
Aptitude calls for the direct ability to listen, curate, and syndicate content, and make them adaptable to the readers. Aside from automated alerts, content can also be extended into real-time marketing through digests and contests. When it comes to attitude, you have to exude authenticity in building fan-driven content based on interactions and experiences coming from the customer’s experiences. More than the brand, customers trust the instincts of their fellow clients when availing products and services.
With these arguments, we can conclude that the promise of real-time marketing is real, as opposed to being a hoax. Perhaps the biggest challenge is that there’s no fixed formula to master real-time marketing. But with a lot of creativity, real-time marketing can pave the way for competitive differentiation.
Allie Cooper studies online marketing. On Twitter, you can ask her about the new trends such as real-time marketing, storytelling, and content marketing. You can also extend this discussion on her official G+ account.
