What Is Real-Time Marketing?

Real-Time Marketing

Real-time marketing means reacting in real, or near, real-time. It’s about creating relevant messaging, and it’s achieved on social channels by listening to and anticipating customer needs. Essentially, this marketing focuses on current events, trends, or feedback. This type of marketing occurs when your company reacts, instead of planning or strategizing a marketing plan for months. That’s not to say that you won’t have this marketing plan, but it’ll be a quicker turnaround.

The objective? To connect with your audience and communicate your brand position.

How does Real-Time Marketing benefit businesses?

One of the beauties of real-time marketing is that it doesn’t require extensive technology or planning to achieve your business goals. If executed successfully, real-time marketing can serve as a great technique to grow your business quickly and efficiently.

Real-time marketing can grow your business by increasing your brand’s online engagement, diversifying your content, and driving the bottom-line, all while distinguishing your brand from your competitors.

Statistics:

• More than half of respondents said they need to interact with customers more quickly.
• 29% of respondents are not engaging in any type of real-time marketing.
• 85% of respondents said it is fundamental, significant or important to their future business success to provide experiences that are responsive to customers based on this marketing, in-the- moment behaviours.
• 45% of companies offer real-time responses via social media channels (either by in-house staff of agencies).
• 84% of companies see the primary benefit of this marketing being a ‘better customer experience‘ (vs 72% who cite improved conversion rates).
• The weather (38%) and location (29%)  given as two of the most effective types of data used for responding to customers in real-time.
• The lack of a unified database (41%) and company culture cited as the primary barriers to effective real-time marketing.

Real-Time Marketing Tactics

1. Always Be Listening (ABL)

To do real-time marketing right, you need to have your ear to the ground and catch trends as they happen.

2. Resources

Have the resources in place to act quickly. Oreo’s social media team succeeded because they were prepared. When the perfect opportunity appeared, they could pounce on it.

3. Ambassador Network

Timing is everything when it comes to this marketing and opportunities are short-lived. You’ll need to get the message out quickly before the trend starts pointing downward.

It relies on creative thinking and letting your customers know about your initiative. Tap your employee advocacy programs and social ambassadors to not only let them know about the initiative, but also ask them to share it online, letting their networks know about it.

4. Not One and Done

Be ready to participate and take part in the conversation, reply, and initiate conversations. If your customers are active on LinkedIn and Twitter, show up and be there. Answer questions, ask questions, be an active part of the conversation so that when they’re ready to buy, you’re the most natural option because you’re already there.