Social networks like Twitter have sped up content consumption. Brands must create online media to remain in socially charged discussions, and they have to produce content at scale to retain viewers’ attention. With news breaking faster than ever before on the web, companies have found themselves stuck in the middle of a real-time marketing (RTM) evolution.
To discuss the proliferation of RTM, eMarketer spoke with Percolate Co-Founder Noah Brier about the landscape, and highlighted key points marketers should know. The merging of content creation and social media marketing has forced brands to think on their toes. Brier notes that marketers must have vested interests in what’s happening around them in order to create content that will have an impact in real time. He says the major challenge is, “[companies are] not used to consuming culture, content and ideas in real time,” Brier continues, “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.”‘
Naturally, paying attention to every possible timely event can be difficult for brands with various ongoing projects, which is why social listening and analytics are so important. Companies like Sprinklr allow marketing departments to be Social@Scale and understand consumer sentiment about specific subject matter in seconds. All of this insight, in theory, should speed up the content creation process, and Brier says it’s important for companies to change their approaches to content marketing.
Well-written web content can meet all criteria put in place by community managers and take advantage of timely trends through effective social listening protocol.
“We work with clients who have an approval process that’s four weeks, others, four days, and some that don’t have an approval process at all…,” Brier continues, “[Certain] structures within brand marketing need to change for a brand to be able to get to be real-time.”
However, brands shouldn’t bypass approval processes in order to get rushed content out the door and into the public. Well-written web content can meet all criteria put in place by community managers and take advantage of timely trends through effective social listening protocol. Strategists must keep a close watch on news circulating among influencer circles, and when the moment’s right, content writers must create articles to enter discussions and drive referral traffic. This process speeds up content creation organically, as businesses are naturally more aware of what’s going on in the world, how their customers feel about recent events and keywords that will put media in front of the right people online.
