What Is Real-Time Marketing? Take Advantage of the Here and Now

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The term “real-time” is often used in marketing to describe marketing strategies that are updated either in real-time or “near” real-time, where a business can adjust its marketing efforts as events unfold. Even if you have the best intentions, it can be hard to stay consistent with your goals without the right tools and team to help you.

According to research from Smart Insights, most companies believe that real-time data brings increased audience engagement. Many organizations do not have a formal process to deliver real-time marketing intelligence.

A majority of respondents say they need to be more responsive to customers in order to be successful in the future.

The key to success is being able to analyze data as it happens and using it immediately, instead of waiting days or more for the results. It can take a long time to review and approve social strategy if the team gets a lot of data.

Companies are looking for ways to create real-time marketing campaigns that will be more successful and keep them relevant to their customers.

What is real-time marketing?

There are many ways to get marketing messages across to customers today, like making a fun TikTok that shows off your products, or preparing a well-thought-out webinar presented by high-level executives in your industry. As media evolves and users become less responsive to the vast amount of marketing content they see every day, you need to change your strategies and create content that will have an impact. Queue real-time marketing.

Real-time marketing involves creating relevant messaging through your company’s social media channels in response to current events. Building brand awareness through social media promotion is essential. This means that you need to keep an ear out for customer data and news about your brand, competitors, or industry.

Real-time marketing is a method of marketing that allows businesses to create more personalized or timely messaging, and deliver it to their customers on platforms like their website, email, or social media. This helps businesses stay ahead of the competition.

Real-time marketing has been around since the mid-1990s, but it became more popular when businesses started using social media to get immediate customer insights. Real-time marketing has grown and evolved over time to keep up with current trends.

Marketers can use artificial intelligence technologies and social listening tools to find out large amounts of qualitative data about their customers. Since brands can get more detailed information about their audiences, they can create deeper relationships with them and keep them for a longer period of time.

You will need data that is close to real-time in order to use real-time marketing in your organization.

How does real-time marketing benefit businesses?

One of the great things about real-time marketing is that it doesn’t take a lot of technology or planning to achieve your business goals. Real-time marketing can help your business grow quickly and efficiently if it is done successfully.

Real-time marketing can help your business by increasing your brand’s online engagement, diversifying your content, and driving the bottom-line. This type of marketing can also help distinguish your brand from your competitors.

Increasing customer engagement

Not only is it vital to keep your employees engaged, but also your customers. The study found that real-time social interaction increased audience engagement for nearly 76% of brands.

Great brands put their customers first. Since real-time marketing can happen at any moment, you have the opportunity to be consistent with your audience interaction. You are improving your customer engagement and relationships by doing this.

For example, you can interact with your audience by responding to comments on your latest Facebook post or answering customer product questions on your Instagram story. Showing that you care about your customers by listening to them and responding to them in real time creates a great customer experience. However you choose to engage with your customers, you will create a brand identity that they can trust and purchase from.

Driving sales

The internet is a fast paced environment and our attention spans are not able to keep up. New research indicates that the average person’s attention span is now only eight seconds. This is a decrease from the average attention span of 12 seconds that was reported in 2000. It’s tough for marketers to get customers’ attention because there’s a lot of competition and sales cycles are unpredictable. The economy is also not doing great. Real-time marketing means creating messages that fully engage your audience and drive action, through channels such as email.

Geographic data allows you to target your messaging to customers based on their location in real-time. A rideshare company could make unique promotional offers for customers celebrating holidays in major cities, such as a discount for New Year’s Eve rides in New York City. You can also collect demographic data, such as age or gender identity, to offer personalized sales promotions to your customers.

No matter what data you use, you can connect with your customers more effectively by responding to them in real time. This way, you can provide them with custom solutions when they need it most. You will improve your customer conversion rate and motivate your customers to take action.

Diversifying your content

Producing content that is diverse in nature exposes you to many opportunities to connect with your target audience. Diversifying your content also allows you to reach and engage with audiences you haven’t targeted before. Many marketers are only using a few channels and content types, which is preventing them from expanding their reach and becoming more well-known. If you use real-time marketing techniques in your strategy, you will be able to create different kinds of content, which has many benefits.

Real-time marketing is creating content that is relevant to what is happening in your brand’s ecosystem. This type of marketing encourages you to be reactive to what is happening so that you can provide your customers with the best content possible. Your content will change along with your customer’s sentiment, industry, and brand.

Different types of content can help you reach new customers and engage with new markets. The expansion into new markets will also give you access to new data that can be used to improve your content, product, or service, as well as your brand as a whole.

How three brands benefitted from real-time marketing

In order for real-time marketing to be successful in 2022, automation will need to be in place to react to a potential customer’s behavior. In addition, the right tools, processes, and team will need to be in place in order to react to trends and feedback from your audience.

For this exercise, we will only consider strategies that can be executed in a short period of time, meaning within a day or two, and don’t require full automation.

Near real-time technology is not necessary for marketers because humans are still needed to implement the marketing plans.

While real-time marketing can take place anywhere, it is most often successful on social media because the content is viral and can be seen by many people for free. This does not mean that other types of real-time marketing, such as email or other channels, are not valuable, but for these examples, we will use the most successful public examples.

ALS Ice Bucket Challenge

In 2014, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge went viral. The concept is still widely known even 10 years later.

The challenge was to dump a bucket of ice water on your head and post it on social media. You were supposed to tag three friends to do the same thing within 24 hours. companies didn’t wait long to get involved. Many well-known brands have followed suit.

It was a combination of factors that made the challenge take off the way it did. These include viral challenges that had been done before, as well as increased awareness, charity, and social media use. The challenge raised $115 million for ALS in 2014. This is a perfect example of how real-time marketing can take advantage of trends for those who are prepared.

Wendy’s edgy social media

The official brand account for Wendy’s on Twitter has a fantastic voice for snapping back at both competitors and customers.

The only reason this tactic works well for them is because they were the first to do it. When Twitter became oversaturated with marketing messages and content calendars in the mid-2010s, Wendy’s was one of the first brands to break away.

The McDonald’s rival was able to get a lot of Twitter followers by making timely and interesting comments, and by entering into conversations with customers and other companies.

Wendy’s is a good example of how to do social media correctly, but it is also a warning. Those who post on social media without thinking it through first are more likely to look foolish when a competitor takes advantage of their mistake.

Innocent Drinks pandemic updates

In May 2020, forgetting what day it is was common. A select few months into the pandemic, it was easy for everyone to become hermits and lose track of time. The weekdays started to blend together and many people were spending all their time on Zoom calls.

Innocent Drinks posted a series of daily tweets with a friendly reminder that we’re not alone in our stay-at-home struggles. The company’s updates were humorous and kept the company’s customers thinking about the brand during a time when they needed it.

The social media team decided to turn the friendly updates into a friendly contest to make the concept even more successful. In exchange for free smoothies, customers were encouraged to record and share their best “useless sofa activities” for the benefit of Age UK charity.

What software supports real-time marketing?

Thanks to advances in technology, there are now more tools available than ever before to help you manage and guide your marketing efforts. By using the latest technologies and real-time marketing strategies, you can deliver quality and effective marketing messages to your customers. There are many real-time marketing tools available that can help you improve your business.

Timely marketing is a key part of a successful marketing strategy. We discovered that being attentive to your consumers and responding to them right away with appropriate responses can assist you in attaining your objectives and enlarging your company.

Real-time marketing is a great way to connect with your customers by showing that you listen to them and care about their concerns. For example, you can show your customers that you’re responsive by reacting to a power outage at the Super Bowl or by offering a challenge for them to accumulate 18 million tweets to receive free nuggets for a year.

As social media becomes more prominent in the marketing industry, it is also becoming more important to make real-time marketing a central part of your online strategy. The goal of good customer service is to deliver excellent messaging to customers.

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