Your potential customers are surfing the web in real-time, so why not market to them in real-time? Real-time marketing, or marketing in response to events, both national and in your users’ lives (think “Happy birthday” emails) made national headlines when Oreo posted an eerily timely tweet during the Super Bowl – in mere minutes, a team of designers and marketers produced an ad that would normally take months and months to develop. By acting on an extremely current event, Oreo managed to capitalize on the national interest and create a side conversation. Efforts like this may seem merely kitschy, cute, or, at worst, creepy. But in the much-hyped “fast-paced” digital world, consumers expect brands to be aware of the world around them. If your brand is detached when others are engaged, it sends a bad message to your consumers: you’re out of touch with the world and, possibly, them.
But how can a business without Oreo’s resources stay ready at the trigger to surprise and delight potential customers? Fortunately, Oreo used a tool available to all business owners for free – Twitter. It’s easy enough for a business owner to keep tabs on current events and send out a related tweet, coinciding exactly with the news. The added benefit of timely messaging is that you get more exposure by taking advantage of trending hashtags – for instance, tweeting #Emmys last night, provided your tweet was clever and relevant, would have gotten some eyes on your business. But, with great power comes great responsibility – it’s easy to rashly send a tweet that gets your business negative attention in the heat of the moment. Take this example from iMedia – a clothing brand probably isn’t best equipped to process the George Zimmerman trial verdict, especially when they do it in such an ugly way. Act quickly, but not so quickly you can’t think!
Another example of real-time marketing that’s fully relevant to smaller businesses comes from Old Spice. Creating videos, complete with Old Spice’s humorously shirtless spokesman, on the fly in response to user submitted content may seem pricy and time consuming, but the principle – engaging users in an exciting and entertaining way at the very moment they’re contacting you – is something any business can get behind. Whether it’s setting up a Twitter hour every week where you reply to consumers in real-time, or simply being quick on the draw when you get comments on your Facebook page, it pays to stay in touch with users – exactly when they’re looking at you.
For more examples of real-time marketing success and failures, visit iMedia Connection.