Real-time Marketing and the Dynamic Customer Experience

What has driven this need for real-time marketing? The answer lies in a few different areas. Firstly, it’s societal. If you look at other industries there is an underlying vein of ‘better and faster’.

Fast food has always been around, but the demand for quality, responsibly-sourced ingredients has emerged in recent years, with no trade-off on time. Technology is an obvious one, as the processing power increases so do the expectations of the product itself. Even banking, the service that determines the safety of our assets, is expected to be better and faster with each interaction.

So why should marketing be any different?

As marketers, we are asking people to spare their precious attention and take notice of our activities, to process them and even consider them relative to their needs. Easier said than done.

Our preferences change faster than the weather and the number of influences we are subject to is growing at a phenomenal rate. This affects our behaviors and in turn how we access information. Furthermore, these access modes are disparate – mobile, tablet, offline, in-store, word-of-mouth?

There is a melting pot of factors that are driving us to need more, quicker.

Customers want to be impressed. Whether it’s a discount code at the right point of the consideration funnel, or an opportunistic social media engagement, it should be a meaningful engagement at the right time, in the right place.

On the other hand, digital has a large role to play in the relative demand of this strategy. Marketing automation has been around for a long time but it’s only in the past few years that we’ve really been able to harness its potential. Just like so many other programs and strategies, there is one key factor that unpins the entire process – data.

Real-time data processing and insight delivery has advanced significantly and so has our knowledge and understanding of the customer journey.

Brandwatch’s data visualization platform, Vizia, is a good example of how real-time data can be used to project the voice of the customer internally to drive timely and informed engagement strategies.

Most successful marketers will tell you that you cannot deliver a meaningful customer experience without good data. Ultimately, real-time marketing should be considered a customer experience initiative – the dynamic customer experience.

If you want to target and engage with customers in meaningful and agile ways, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be doing real-time marketing. The formula for getting it right is a simple one – you need the right people, the right data, and the right technology.

In this guide, we’re going to address the process, people and potential of real-time marketing.

But first, what is real-time marketing?

Real-time marketing, in the moment marketing, RTM. The name differs but the objective maintains – to meaningfully connect with customers at the right moment in time.

Marketing traditionally is viewed as a n=many approach but the digitization of the customer journey and personalization has moved us closer to an n=1 approach. This is true of RTM also.

Real-time marketing shouldn’t be solely associated with viral trends and social media. It’s about making sure the people on your team are on the same page and have a similar understanding of the job that needs to be done.

It’s also about enabling those people to make smart decisions with the information available to them. Think about it across all activities and all campaigns.

How you choose to integrate RTM into your marketing strategy will depend on your objectives and resources. Consider real-time customer journey marketing if you have the data and technology to leverage.

Can you start offering discount codes to visitors to your website at the right stage of the funnel? For example, if a user abandons their cart 3 times or more, serve them a pop-up with a 10% discount code.

If you want to drive awareness, look to large-scale planned events. Get personal with location-based or brand event-based initiatives. The list goes on.

No matter what kind of marketing activities your company is doing, one thing you should always bear in mind is – what’s in it for them?

How is this ultimately going to serve your customer? Will it drive value? Will it move them to another stage in the funnel? Will it even register?

The more confidently you can answer these questions, the higher the chance of your message landing.

1. Process

Data

If you think you can succeed with real-time marketing without live data, you’re in the wrong place. Everything pivots on this, but not all data is created equal. You need to have a clear understanding of who your customers are, where they are, and how and when they engage.

This ultimately requires an overview of data from multiple sources and a commitment to customer-driven data.

From a customer point of view, you need a grasp on the customer journey – everything from social media to website data through to CRM data.

On the other hand, it’s hugely important to understand socio-political trends, industry news, even the weather. By bringing all of these sources together you have an adequate baseline and starting point.

The process of real-time market research can help you understand the always-on mindset needed.

With the Vizia platform, you can bring together multiple data sources including Salesforce, Hootsuite Impact and Google Analytics in beautiful data visualization platform, giving you a complete overview of your world.

Once the technology and data are in place, it’s about finding the relationships between the different sets. A view of the bigger picture will help achieve this. Is there something that can be learned from previous behavior?

Create maps that explore the probabilities of the customer journey. If they do ‘this’ what are the chances of them then doing ‘that’? Look ahead to upcoming events.

Aim for a 360 degree view of the world your company operates in.

Content marketing

When people think of content marketing they often think of blogs, guides, campaigns – things that take time and planning, but without a solid content marketing strategy succeeding at real-time marketing will be a struggle.

You’re not expected to write a blog in under two minutes, but you should be aware of how the activities you have already planned and prepared can be used if and when the opportunity arises. Having an agile and reactive content strategy will give you the flexibility needed to act on opportunities at the right time, and most importantly, with the right message.

Kit Kat’s famous #bendgate tweet shows how a brand can jump on an opportunity while also staying aligned with its current marketing messaging.

In response to the reports of iPhone 6’s breaking in people’s pockets, Kit Kat put out an image of a bar snapped at a 45-degree angle. This clever move sat nicely with its current “Have a break, have a KitKat” campaign.

There can obviously be an element of pre-planning involved also.

Large-scale events like the Super Bowl and the Oscars are good examples of how brands can prepare to expect the unexpected. Of course, the better the data at your disposal, the easier this will be.

The brand

Building a brand is no easy feat. It takes thought, strategy, assets and often a bit of luck. The last thing you want to do is put this hard work in jeopardy with a poorly planned tweet. There are too many examples of brands missing the mark. You don’t want to be one of them.

In February 2017, Reebok reacted to the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell interrupting Elizabeth Warren with a move that resonated with a lead brand audience and hit the right tone. The team jumped on the opportunity and quickly designed, and put into production, a t-shirt with the slogan “Nevertheless she persisted”.

The t-shirt sold out in six hours and over the course of the campaign, 80% of the people that visited Reebok’s website were new to the site. 100% of the proceeds went to the women’s march.

Reebok was able to do this because of its ‘newsroom’ where three key teams work together – editorial, public relations and social media. By combining these disciplines with a constant ear to the ground, the brand succeeded in underscoring their position as a female-first brand, creating awareness and driving real and long-lasting engagement.

Having a clear understanding of your brand aesthetic, voice and identify is crucial. Ideally, you should be carrying out some real-time brand tracking also. This will give you an understanding of how your brand is being perceived at any given time making it easier to time activities.

It can make or break the entire strategy.

If you were to focus on one, make it the tone of voice. Have you used humor in your marketing before? No. Think carefully before you send that pun. Have you taken a political stance before? No. Maybe a snap social engagement isn’t the time to do it.

In reality, driving brand equity should be a key goal of your strategy. If people can recognize your brand without having to look at the handle or author, you’ve succeeded.

2. People

The Team

One of the challenges of real-time marketing is being able to turn data into insight. It requires the right team to identify the opportunities in a sea of data. Not everyone can do this. It demands a level of creativity, agility, speed and knowledge.

In addition, you need a team that can maintain a macro and micro view of the world – taking what’s happening externally and mapping it to what you know internally. Looking beyond social media to the customer journey and thinking to the future – how can new technology bring you closer to optimizing the customer experience in real-time.

Through powerful real-time data processing, easy to understand visuals and centrally controlled distribution, the Vizia platform creates a central narrative and help aligns your team, bringing everyone on the same page no matter where in the world they are.

Organizational buy-in

In order to be nimble and reactive, you need to sign off to push the button before the fact.

This ultimately involves communicating the value of your activities to the people that care about that button. The teams in Oreo and Nasa that put together that content more than likely had the autonomy to make that decision.

As previously discussed, RTM falls into the remit of always-on customer experience so being able to champion its benefits in this respect can be hugely valuable. Having a tangible customer-driven focus will differentiate you from competitors and drive loyalty.

3. Potential

To some, the benefits of real-time marketing will be obvious, but it’s important to understand the effect these initiatives can have on the business.

Social media effectiveness

Social media planning, publishing and managing takes time and resources. By taking a more reactive approach to social media brands can add more value for less basically taking a quality over quantity approach.

Real-time marketing has been proven to increase conversion rates so by oiling up the social media machine and investing less time in extensive publishing calendars, you can focus more other areas that need work.

But what about the bottom line?

By investing in real-time marketing the brand is making a commitment to dynamic customer experience or in other words always-on customer experience.

Brands that have adopted a customer-first approach are proving to be more capable of standing the test of time. The reason for this falls mainly in the remit of customer satisfaction and loyalty. By increasing the investment in these outputs, brands can reduce churn and focus more attention on relationship nurturing and retention strategies.