Brands have grown accustomed to buzzword marketing terms. In some cases, these phrases signal a transition from one practice to another for the greater good of the industry and, in other instances, they merely last for a few months. Currently, real-time marketing has become a topic of conversation among professionals who see potential success in engaging prospects with a sense of urgency. For example, timely responses to customers’ queries via popular social networks can drive website conversions higher or lead to supplementary forms of interaction.
Brafton reported on an eMarketer interview with Percolate’s Co-Founder Noah Brier who noted that, “If you want to be creating real-time content, it means, by definition, you have to know what’s happening in real time, what’s relevant.”
The concept of real-time marketing seems impossible to many organizations because it requires marketers to be readily available and aware of news events as they take place. However, it’s possible for companies to anticipate web chatter before it takes place.
IBM surveyed more than 500 companies worldwide about their outreach agendas. The company evaluated “performance leaders” – a group IBM defined as those in the top 20 percent of brands using cross-channel integration and technology in marketing. IBM also looked at the remaining subset of companies to understand their use of real-time programs. Overall, two in five “performance leaders” already produce web content for immediate use, compared to 15 percent of the remaining population of businesses.
70 percent of “performance leaders” use automation on social channels to give followers the information they need in a timely manner.
To no surprise, brands begin their real-time marketing processes with analytics, and evaluate trends across online content, social chatter and search trends. Insights gleaned from these channels help marketers understand their customers and inspire content creation efforts that can provide prospects with educational context before they even have to ask. IBM reported that 70 percent of “performance leaders” use automation on social channels to give followers the information they need in a timely manner.
While producing media for future use may not seem like real-time marketing, it allows companies to interact with fans and followers on their terms, maintain scalability across other departments and produce content with various time-sensitive needs. Rumors suggest Twitter may experiment with retargeting features to put media in front of users based on content they’ve recently engaged with. This is another example of dated content fulfilling real-time needs, and when updates are crafted with analytics data in mind, relevance will last much longer.
