Real-Time Marketing is the “right time to cast” portion of the social sea theory. It is using data gathered instantly to make a marketing decision in the moment. For example, there could be a popular hashtag that your business can use to promote a new product or service, so you decide to create an ad and hop on that hashtag so more people can see your posts. This is a great way to get your content to go viral in a short period of time. Planning out your content ahead of time is important, but using real-time marketing is critical to your digital marketing strategy.
Benefits
The benefits of adding real-time marketing into your digital marketing plan is that it is a great way to connect with your target market. The point of digital marketing or marketing in general is to cultivate a connection with your customers and potential buyers. People want to buy from businesses that they like, have similar values as their own and ones they can relate to. This is basically what marketing is all about. Real-time marketing helps your business join in on conversions with your target market, so they can connect with you.
How?
In my opinion there are 7 steps you can take to use real-time marketing:
- Develop a plan on how you will socially listen and come together with your team to discuss plans. (possibly on a short notice)
- Social Listening, basically the act of monitoring social networks to discover possible real time marketing opportunities.
- Real-time marketing strategy
- Create the content
- Share that content
- Monitor how well it is doing
- Continue the conversation
By following these steps you will be able to not only discover great real time marketing opportunities, but be able to get the most out of your efforts for the longest amount of time.
Examples
Examples of how I’ve used real-time marketing in business and personally are:
One of the companies I provided digital marketing services for needed a Facebook event created for the Washington Football Team and Cowboys football game. So I created a Facebook event during one of the football games and that event ended up getting 11.9K responses. The owner ended up getting so many calls that they had to turn their phone off. This worked out in my favor, because the Washington Football Team and the Cowboys are rivals and it was posted during their game. So many people were on Facebook at the time searching about this particular game.
Another example is a more personal one. After I watched the last Wolverine movie that Hugh Jackman would play (Logan), I tweeted a meme comparing Hugh Jackman being the only Wolverine and all the other actors that have played different superheroes. That tweet got over 200 retweets, 14 quote tweets and over 300 likes. This tweet also had OVER 44,000 impressions! This happened because the movie had just release, many people were tweeting about it, and I used the correct hashtags.
Even though these are examples of how real-time marketing can work to your advantage, it still doesn’t mean that it will work every time. The key is to figure out the right time to cast and to keep casting. Eventually you will catch your fish!
For a more in depth analysis of this, check out the podcast to this blog that will release later in September 2021 on the Social Sea Podcast: https://anchor.fm/sociallinkage
Do you have any real time marketing examples that have worked for you or any more tips? Share them in the comments below.
Social Linkage, LLC 