Real-time marketing means reacting in real, or near-real time. It’s about relevant messaging, and it’s achieved in social channels by listening to and anticipating customer needs.
Paid media (advertising), earned media (content), and owned media (social and PR) are rapidly converging into just … media. Digital channels have long enabled real time optimization of display advertising, but as social listening and monitoring tools proliferate nearly as quickly as social media channels, real-time matters more to marketers. This is true not just because of social media, but also because social is now what provides the creative impetus for paid and owned media. Based on research my colleague Jeremiah Owyang and I very recently jointly published, the new real-time marketing work cycle looks something like this:
Real-time marketing demonstrably works — not just in social channels, but across the marketing spectrum. A recent GolinHarris study finds real-time not only positively impacts standard marketing goals — word-of-mouth, attention, preference, likelihood to try or buy — but it also turbocharges other marketing initiatives, including paid and owned media effectiveness.
How Real Companies Are Leveraging the Power of Real-Time Marketing
That’s all well and good, but in the real world, how are marketers working in real time? There are lots of examples from brands you probably recognize, and most break into one of two buckets: event driven, and customer driven. The former category is what this post will focus on. Event driven real-time marketing embraces public events — think a major sporting event, the Oscars, or Fashion Week. Brand events like trade shows or product launches fall into this category, too. You can even count breaking news in this bucket. Let’s review seven examples of real brands going real-time with their marketing to spark your creativity.