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What is Real-Time Marketing or Real-Time Advertising?
At its core, real-time marketing involves crafting and delivering marketing messages on the fly, responding to real-time events, trends, or customer behaviors.
The traditional way to define real time marketing (RTM) would be this:
Using recent events to perform marketing activities, like hopping on social media trends or responding to current events.
This real-time marketing definition is simple, but far from exhaustive.
Here’s a more formal definition:
Real-time marketing refers to the practice of creating and delivering marketing messages or campaigns on the fly, in response to real-time events, trends, or customer behaviors. It involves the ability to adapt and tailor marketing strategies quickly to capitalize on current, often fleeting, opportunities.
What is real-time advertising? It’s essentially the same thing.
Having introduced the conventional definitions of real time marketing or real time advertising, let’s briefly touch upon our personal experience with real-time marketing at ClearLine Mobile.
We, at ClearLine Mobile, would like to amplify the real-time marketing concept by pointing out these aspects, that, we believe, are missing from the aforementioned definitions:
- Planning is the key. While it might seem that the brand reactions occur in an instant, most of them start planning for campaigns the moment a certain event had been announced – and in most cases, that’s months before the actual event.
- Instantly going viral is by no means the only indicator of a successful real-time advertising campaign. As long as there is a detectable surge in visibility, the goal has been achieved.
- Take into consideration the spontaneous interactions occurring in the moment between a business (in many cases, a business representative – be it an agent, a manager or a cashier) and a customer.
- Integrating into any part of the company operation a highly shareable element also falls into real-time marketing category.
Real-Time Marketing Examples
Let’s skip the most obvious examples that are all over the place – like the Super Bowl ads, FIFA sponsorship, or the Oreo tweet during the Super Bowl energy shortage.
Instead, let’s focus on common yet often overlooked things.
Webinars and Live Streams
Widely spread across the web, webinars, and live streams are excellent tools for both brands and individuals. The audience gets nuggets of useful information, while organizers showcase their expertise, simultaneously converting it into orders and amplifying their audience.
Steal Someone Else’s Thunder
Compared to Barbie, Oppenheimer spent almost zero on movie marketing. Despite that, they arranged for both movies to premiere on the same day and to be shown one after the other in movie theaters. Some would call that hijacking the audience – but in reality, people were almost as willing to see both movies at once, as they were to see them separately. Instead of hijacking, this strategy resulted in a powerful synergy and multiple social media trends.
The same thing happens when technological brands use international techno conferences to launch a new product. The most devoted fans and techno influencers would definitely want to be present for that, especially if there will be a chance to purchase that product. In turn, they’d need to buy the conference tickets and mingle with the crowd. That same crowd will automatically navigate towards any event of interest within the conference – and a product launch is definitely something to see. Win-win.
Augmented Reality
This includes TikTok filters. We all know how quickly those can go viral. Brands are using this trick all the time – almost as often as individual designers. We’d mention a couple of examples, but they’ll definitely be no longer relevant by the time you’re reading this article!
Challenge or Sprint
This is less popular among the brand but is hugely popular among influencers and communities. It’s not precisely clear why brands aren’t enhancing this strategy – or why this strategy had failed before for the big brands
Weather-Specific PPC
A simple yet nice idea for a PPC campaign would be to include weather-specific campaigns and launch them whenever it’s relevant. Like a restaurant offering gazpacho during a sudden heat wave or a selection of hot drinks when the weather is unexpectedly cold.
The beauty of this approach is that it’s easy to set up beforehand, turn it on instantaneously, turn it off the moment it’s no longer relevant and reuse it many times.
Failed Attempts
Pepsi ad with Kendall Jenner. Pepsi was trying to mix influencer marketing with some real-time marketing – given the social tension at that moment back in 2017 – and failed miserably because of misreading social cues.
Real-Time Digital Marketing
Let’s take a look precisely at the digital aspect of real-time advertising.
It involves a more profound personalization. This is something users these days expect.
Starting an email with “Dear Client” is almost seen as rude, given that the whole world knows about the algorithms of personalization.
Besides, setting up several PPC RTM campaigns aimed at different types of users is, at its least, a polite acknowledgement on behalf of the business of everyone being different and having different priorities in their purchasing decisions;
and, at most, a great way to elevate the conversion rate.
Real-Time Digital Marketing Analytics
This would include PPC campaigns, on-site traffic, and social media activities. Depending on the goals you’re aiming for with your real-time marketing and the metrics you’re looking at to measure it, you might want to set up the analytics filters in advance.
In-built social media analytics tabs usually provide a rather limited insight, which is why in so many cases the brands prefer to lead the users to the website.
Google Analytics 4 (they’ve already shut down the Universal, so if you haven’t switched yet – DO IT NOW!) and Google Tag Manager allow measuring and filtering almost anything you set your mind on.
Easy to Set Up Beforehand and Launch Immediately
RTM campaigns might appear spontaneous and unplanned to the audience, but the marketing specialists know how much planning goes into a well-executed instant launch.
This is especially true for:
- PPC campaigns
- Creating & Scheduling organic content
- Social media activities
Setting up an RTA campaign beforehand would include:
- Content
- PPC campaigns with a scheduled launch
- Analytics markers or filters
Doesn’t look that spontaneous now, does it?
Benefits of Real-Time Marketing
Benefits:
Timely and Relevant Content
Think of all the “Back to school” ads or Halloween branding.
There is a reason why no brand promotes pumpkin flavors for Saint Valentine’s Day.
People understandably lean towards information, content, and products that are time and context-relevant, which is the backbone of real-time advertising.
Stay Part of an Ongoing Conversation
People perceive brands as powerful actors, which has eventually become a norm to consider for communication strategies.
Hence, the audience expects brands to take a stand and express their opinion on the events of public relevance.
If a brand refuses to participate, it eventually fades from the public eye.
Real-time marketing is a great way to stay part of an ongoing conversation and retain the subjectivity in the eyes of the world.
Boost Social Relevance
Audi’s 2017 Super Bowl ad called “Daughter” brought into focus the social issues when #metoo was right around the corner.
Audi knew how to read the room, so to speak, and the ad blew up like a bomb – in a good way, of course.
The brand had reinforced its strong connection with society at large and its ongoing tendencies, resulting in its increasing social relevance after the RTM campaign launch.
Don’t forget, there was nothing spontaneous about this ad campaign.
When the wave of affection arrived, Audi would have been ready to receive it with months of prior preparation.
Increased Shareability
If an ad or a piece of content is timely and it resonates with the audience’s emotions, people, naturally, are inclined to share and respond.
This happened a lot with Coca Cola’s campaign when they put names on cans.
This also happened a lot during the McDonalds vs. Burger King social media battle that happened once the US allowed using the competitors’ brand elements in advertisements.
User-Generated Content (If You Get Lucky and Go Viral)
Think about the BuzzFeed quizzes “What Disney Princess are you?”
Have you tried the TikTok filters “What’s your House in Hogwarts?”
How about the Maybelline AI that allows you to try on makeup without applying any directly?
All of these boosted word-of-mouth in the social media space.
User-generated content is literally about this – giving users the tools to generate something for themselves by themselves and let that instrument live a life of its own.
This strategy doesn’t always produce groundbreaking results, but the one that eventually gets viral ends up being worth all the prior efforts.
Challenges of Real-Time Marketing
Unpredictable Outcome
All the meticulous planning may result in an undesirable outcome. Going back to the example of the Audi Super Bowl Ad, basically, Pepsi in their ad with Kendall Jenner had done the same thing, hadn’t they? They tackled a social issue and immersed themselves in the solution. However, the public outrage for Pepsi was aggressive. With real-time advertisement, it’s important to keep in mind the possibility of unpredictable public response.
Time Sensitivity
Late to the party is an unforgivable sin in real-time marketing. If you haven’t got enough time to prepare for a certain event or situation – better let it pass. When everyone in the industry has already taken their stand on the issue, popping up with your brand’s reaction is considered either cowardly or in bad taste, and you don’t want your brand to be associated with either.
This doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t ever reference that particular event in the future for creating a meta-perspective about what had happened. But it will take every bit as much planning as a well-thought-out real-time reaction.
Oversaturation and Overuse
While real-time marketing offers the promise of timely and relevant content, an overreliance on this strategy can lead to unintended consequences. The buzz generated by jumping on every trending conversation, overusing hashtags, or leveraging memes might initially seem like a shortcut to visibility. However, statistics indicate that brands need to tread carefully.
A notable example comes from a study conducted by Social Media Today in 2023, analyzing the impact of hashtag overuse on Twitter engagement. Brands that excessively used popular hashtags witnessed a significant drop in engagement rates, with a 30% decline in retweets and a 20% decrease in overall interaction.
The moral of the story is this – in real-time marketing, you need to know how to pick your battles.
Real-Time Marketing Strategy
Now that we’ve covered the theory, let’s keep it concise and practical.
Let’s say, there’s been a once-in-a-lifetime rock festival announced for the coming year, and we represent a motorcycle company (something like Yamaha). Here’s how we plan a real-time marketing strategy for an event.
Identify an Event.
In our case, we’ve already got it. It’s a rock festival, it has a precise location and a date.
What’s the Objective?
The more precise the objective, the easier it will be to achieve and measure. In our case, let’s take something relatively broad and go for boosting brand recognition.
Who’s the Target Audience?
Best if we could use our own demographic data. In our case, the target demographic of motorcycle buyers coincides with the target demographic of massive rock festivals.
Identify Formats for Marketing Activities.
Depending on the type of event, we could plan for digital activities or real-life activities. Considering the format of our event, we can do both.
Establish Monitoring and Data Collection.
Digital traffic is often a no-brainer, but collecting data on the foot traffic might take a while to plan.
Plan the Marketing Activities.
This includes offline events, a content calendar, PPC campaigns, and anything else that the audience will come into contact with.
For instance, we could negotiate a limited edition launch with the importer and run it with our hashtag during the rock festival. At the same time, we could invite influencers to cover the launch in real time. Meanwhile, all the materials would include an event-specific hashtag, a slogan, a frame, or anything creative to emphasize the dynamism of the situation.
Don’t forget a PPC campaign across all major social networks aimed at the rock festival visitors and demographics.
A cherry on top, a content calendar for warming up the audience and sharing the experience afterward.
Establish Response Protocols.
We already know that things can go wrong in many ways. It’s important to brainstorm the potential damage control scenarios beforehand.
Measure the Impact.
Assess & analyze the collected data.
Conclusion
Real-time marketing is a powerful tool for using almost any ongoing conversation to the benefit of a brand.
The best part is that you have an unlimited number of tries until, one time, your campaign actually goes viral.
Don’t be scared and catch the wave!
