Social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+ etc help you formulate and create a brand image with the help of outbound conversation with the customer. The flip side of the coin is represented by the inbound channels that customers come through like ATM’s, websites, call centers etc.

This article explores the use of Real time marketing when the customers are engaged with the brand/company. For example, consumers increasingly tend to use their smart phones to spend and shop online. This is a great opportunity for retailers employing technologies that can track browsing and location, they can then deploy marketing strategies based on ongoing data collection and analysis. Examples are location based ads via mobile applications or customizable website headers with specific call to action based on activity.

Adoption Of Real Time Marketing Techniques

It’s not news that the scale of changes happening to marketing is unprecedented.  It’s the new normal for the world in general.  In this fast changing environment, the adoption of real-time marketing techniques can help marketing teams win in today’s always-on world, with its many new challenges:

  •  The increase of ever-shifting touch-points and channels to connect with consumers;
  •  Explosion of content — “content” being the majority of what marketing produces in the digital world and the biggest challenge to deliver more than just content, but meaningful customer experiences;
  • Proliferation of devices. There’s the desktop, the smartphone, the tablet, the phablet. Yes, I said the “phablet.” And just wait until the Internet of Things goes mainstream. Imagine how people will use combinations of these devices at the same time!
  •  Fast growing technologies to help execute all these content and experience opportunities on all the new devices, in all these touch-points. But this “help” requires marketing to navigate through a complex array of technology solutions;
  • Explosion of data – according to a recent estimate from Google, we’ve generated 90% of all data in the entire history of the world in just the past two years. 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day. And it’s only accelerating.
  • The connected consumers – instead of passively absorbing perfectly designed marketing campaigns the connected consumer has taken control of his buyer’s journey. He’s connected with other prospects and customers. They’ve found or become influencers, advocates, detractors. They question what brands say and demand answers, quickly. They heartlessly compare brands to competitors, judge, praise, chide, advice, all out in the public square. It’s 24/7, and can’t be turned off.

Marketing In An Agile World

Agile Marketing represents a different approach to manage marketing. It takes its inspiration from agile development and values:

EMM infrastructure stack for Agile marketing

  •  Responding to change over following a plan
  •  Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
  • Collaboration over silos and hierarchy
  • Rapid iterations over long projects
  • Numerous small experiments over a few large studies

Here is an excerpt from a prior Aberdeen Group post.

“As many as 90% of Best-in-Class companies have marketing analytics initiatives in place, versus 69% of “Follower” companies, according to an Aberdeen Group report, titled: Building The New Database Of Intentions With Real-Time Marketing Analytics.

Aberdeen Group surveyed 135 B2C and B2B marketing professionals regarding the ways their companies are leveraging customer analytics to deliver more personalized and relevant marketing campaigns. To better quantify the gap in capabilities and strategies, Aberdeen identified the key differences between top-performing “Best-in-Class” companies and other “Followers.”

The study found that 61% of Best-in-Class businesses deliver outbound offers customized to specific marketing segments, while only 49% of other companies have this capability. Best-in-Class organizations also are equipped to disseminate outbound offers to specific individuals (48%), which is something very few Followers (26%) can do.

“While a number of ‘traditional’ marketing analytics approaches can be used to support personalization,”

the report indicated,

“including analysis of transactional data often correlated with demographic information. Best-in-Class companies are more likely to complement these sources with a number of behavior-based capabilities.”

Real-Time Infrastructure To Improve Customer Experience

One on one realtime offers

Aberdeen Group compared Best-in-Class companies and Followers regarding the types of data they collect to fuel real-time marketing efforts.

These information streams include:

  • Internal transactional records (91% vs. 76%);
  • Internal customer records (83% vs. 82%);
  • External data sources of customer information (55% vs. 37%);
  • Customer sentiment data such as Net Promoter Score (55% vs. 27%);
  • Customer interaction data such as contact center notes (48% vs. 38%);
  • Unstructured data such as emails and reviews (41% vs. 28%);
  • External data sources of customer behavior (41% vs. 26%);
  • Social media data (41% vs. 18%); and
  • Clickstream data (38% vs. 22%).

There is a clear difference in the variety and velocity of data that Best-in-Class organizations and Followers collect and access. This may be attributed to the fact that more advanced businesses are implementing robust solutions that help them gather and analyze data more efficiently.

For example, many Best-in-Class companies are using predictive analytics (58%), customer or marketing analytics solutions (55%), and customer segmentation tools (50%); Only 41%, 38% and 30% of Followers, respectively, use this series of solutions.”

“The complexity and opportunity for marketing analytics may seem daunting for some organizations,” noted Trip Kucera, Senior Research Analyst, Marketing Effectiveness and Strategy at Aberdeen Group. “But new technologies have emerged to make sophisticated data analytics more affordable and approachable.”