Real-time marketing – REALly ???

The answer is simple: YES! But why is real-time marketing nowadays so important and successful? As companies want to engage with their audience, listen to their users, and be part of their conversations, I believe that real-time marketing cannot be avoided anymore. It is a must have for the marketing mix, and it demonstrably works. In this blog post I will give insights into the benefits of real-time marketing and the effects it can have:

1. What are the characters of real-time marketing?
Real-time marketing is -> NOW!  -> FRESH!  -> VIBRANT!  -> RELEVANT!
It is ‘alive’ so as the consumers of each company are and their desire is to be informed exactly like that! Act now and BEFORE the opportunity is passed by and competitors do it.

This great video from Google visualizes the steps how to make use of real-time marketing and which tools are useful to always be prepared:

2. Don’t do it!
Often marketers are under the pressure of pushing their campaigns, selling their products and only focusing on the highest profit. Don’t do that. With real-time marketing you have the chance to engage with the audience, to listen to them, and to be PART of their conversations. It is the chance to find out, what they think and like/dislike.
Many companies also focus on long-term campaigns (which is not wrong), but throughout all the planning they do forget about the consumer TODAY and ongoing events, news, or happenings.

3. What is the ROI for your business
One of the main reasons to make use of real-time marketing is to increase the profit. The communication firm Golin Harris measured the outcome of the most important segments marketers want to achieve. They analyzed the likelihood of communication with and without real-time marketing and all segments had a positive increase.

4. Examples of real-time marketing

Pepsi
Events are a great category for marketers to use real-time marketing as it involves the audience immediately. When Pepsi launched its new ‘Diet Pepsi skinny’ during the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in February 2011, they reached an extremely wide audience.
With the hashtag  #skinnycan Pepsi did not only involved the fans of their own brand, but also fashion interested and Mercedes-Benz fans who were talking about the event itself.

Apple – iPad Mini
Another example, which is very up-to-date, is the announcement of the new iPad Mini on October 23^rd. Apple barely made use of live video streaming before but this time they did. Through that they were connected to their customers and fans in real-time, and not only to the suppliers, retailers, or journalists (who were marketing and communicating in real-time as well). Many bloggers made use of these streams and through that incredible high communication about the iPad Mini started to cross the web. The Topsy analytics underneath show the exact increase of the graph at the time real-time marketing was used at its best and reached out to thousands of users right away.

5. The costs?!
Time is money and this is the only but biggest factor what makes real-time costly as it definitely is time consuming.
Of course there also exist many tools, which help companies to measure their brand sentiment. At the beginning companies can make use of free tools. The biggest costs are in the team, who make the real-time marketing magic happen. They should be trained to answer in the brand’s tone of voice and of course to response in REAL-TIME as good as possible.

Blogroll:

 

http://www.webinknow.com/2012/08/the-real-time-business-mindset.html#comments

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/are-you-ready-for-a-real-time-marketing-and-pr-crisis/

 

word count: 580
Sources

*B. Macy, T. Thompson
The power of real-time social media marketing. McGraw-Hill. 1^st edition.
December 2010
Chapter 1, 3

*Pepsi Fashion-week 2011. Real-time marketing example.
http://www.pepsico.com/PressRelease/Diet-Pepsi-Debuts-its-Sleek-New-Look-at-Mercedes-Benz-Fashion-Week02082011.html

http://www.facebook.com/dietpepsi

*Golin Harris.
http://golinharris.com/#!/insights/real-time-marketing-research/

*The social media agency:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kuNgcAlvVE

*The power of real-time marketing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4TiPtP08LE

*Apple forum:
http://www.macrumors.com/2012/10/23/ipad-mini-media-event-also-streaming-via-apples-website/

*Huffpost live:
http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/segment/5086e00bfe34443ae2000036

*Apple Events:
http://www.apple.com/apple-events/october-2012/

*Topsy:
http://analytics.topsy.com

by Biggy Zahn / 1599041

 Group members                           Twitter ID                             Class

• Rachael Stewart                    ICM_rachael                         B01
• Elleke de Leeuw                    Elleke_de_Leeuw
• Jess White                              JessyICM
• Olaf Nagtegaal                      OlafNagtegaal
• Biggy Zahn                             BiggyZahn