Today’s digital consumers are tweeting, Facebooking, blogging, emailing, and chatting 24/7, and they expect your brand to be present and accounted for, wherever and whenever they choose to be online. There’s no sleeping on the job these days for marketers who must find creative ways to connect and engage with these customers in real-time.
There is little doubt that marketers who are only focused on traditional campaign marketing—focused on the future and not in the moment—are about to be left behind. So how do you craft and create engaging content for these always-on consumers? How do you bridge the gap between your brand’s live presence and its engagement with your audience? Closing this gap to assure your brand lives “in the moment” will help you seize opportunities to connect and engage with an audience that can disappear as fast as they appear.
Real-time marketing is the ability to monitor, manage and guide your marketing efforts as they occur or in “real time.” According to David Meerman Scott, a pioneer in the practice of real-time marketing, it is “when companies develop (or refine) products of services instantly, based on feedback from customers or events in the marketplace. It’s when businesses see an opportunity and are the first to act on it.”
Creating and publishing real-time content needs to be a priority for companies who want to take content marketing to the next level. In order to do so you’ll need to arm yourself with the latest tools to find out who these people are, what they want and how best to engage them. If you are the first to engage the market, people notice and your offering gains valuable attention. Scott says, “If you react early and connect with customers as their concerns arise, they see you as thoughtful and caring.”
Real-time content marketing is not easy but it can be lightening in a bottle for companies willing to be proactively vigilant. To leverage its potential, digital marketers must listen to what’s being said online about their brands and what’s happening in the marketplace, digest and analyze, then immediately formulate content in response that delivers the right message in the right formats.
Barb Schmitz is professional writer with over 20 years of experience writing for B2B and B2C publications and web sites. She served as an editor on Computer-Aided Engineering magazine for over 10 years before starting her own PR/freelance writing business in 2000. Her expertise includes interviewing, researching and writing whitepapers, blogs, e-books, case studies, and feature articles.
