Understanding Real-Time Marketing
Did you know that a study carried out at Monetate and eConsultancy concluded that marketers in the UK reported a 26% increase in conversion rates thanks to real-time marketing?
That doesn’t really tell you much, does it?
In order to understand the concept, we need to understand what people consider to be real-time marketing efforts in the first place. Here’s the gist:
- 80% of the participants in the study consider real-time to be an action that takes place within two minutes of an event.
- 45% of the companies that participated in the study consider social media channels to be the perfect platform for real-time communication.
- 84% of the participants consider real-time marketing efforts to be a factor that leads to better customer experience.
- Weather (38%) and location (29%) are two of the most effective data types for real-time marketing efforts.
- Lack of database and company culture are the biggest barriers to effective real-time marketing efforts. More on this later.
To summarise, real-time marketing techniques involve all the marketing efforts that help a brand or organisation share real-time information or generate value in real-time through events happening around them. These events can be in the form of news, weather phenomena or even feedback on products and services.
The biggest factor that drives this form of marketing is responsiveness- reacting instead of following a strict marketing plan that leaves no room for quick thinking and good humour.
Social media teams are usually the origin and source of this model since they are constantly updated with the latest trends, fads and breaking news.
By gathering customer data from your analytics tools and carrying out some market research, you can also estimate what sort of real-time marketing messages will resonate with your target audiences.
One of my favourite real-time marketing campaigns was Wendy’s 18 million retweets episode. Wendy’s are extremely well known for nailing customer engagements and making the most of social marketing strategies. Their communication is light, quick, funny and engaging.
Back in 2017, a young lad called Carter Wilkerson reached out to Wendy’s on Twitter and asked them how many retweets he would need, to win free chicken nuggets for a year. A few minutes later, Wendy’s responded with 18 million.
This chat gave birth to the #nuggetsforcarter tag, which became so viral, it caught the attention of giants like Microsoft, Amazon and Google, who enlisted to help him win his free year of chicken nuggets.
Carter went on to win his free nuggets and Wendy’s made a donation of $100,000 to the Dave Thomas Foundation, a non-profit that finds homes for children in foster care.
This entire adventure revolved around the concept of taking a gamble on communication. For Wendy’s, their spicy communication style and the attention they give each individual customer gave them the ability to spin the entire thing and create a massive real-time marketing campaign out of it.
Before jumping into quick banters with customers, ask yourself whether this sort of model resonates with your brand and the positioning you are trying to achieve. Is your company culture fluid and colourful or more strict and grounded? Are you able to gather meaningful insights and data on customers such as location and habits? And lastly, do you have the resources you require to pull off real-time marketing acts effectively.
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