Real-time marketing is marketing that happens live. It can be an important way to gain awareness for an event, building your email list, or drive sales of a specific product or service.
While it isn’t technically planned, you still need to invest in the technology and potential services required to perform real-time marketing. It takes work!
Use Facebook Ads, Twitter, Facebook groups, and even comment on blog posts, just to name a few ideas, to gather the information that you need to conduct real-time marketing information regarding your industry on your target audience. All of these can be very helpful to your business and increase your bottom line.
Still not sure what real-time marketing is? Let me give you an example.
Take your favourite reality show, for example Dancing With The Stars. After each dance, viewers can have their say, and sometimes they get to choose things such as who dances with who on an upcoming show. Or American Idol, you get a chance to vote by phone or online who will make it to next week. Or even someone from your favourite show will be tweeting and answering questions during the broadcast of the show.
While we don’t realize that our favourite TV shows are marketing to us, in many cases, they are doing tactics of real-time marketing.
How does Real-Time Marketing Work?
It takes planning and effort on your part as a business owner, but the results may be worth it.
ENGAGE Your Audience
Using real-time marketing efforts and listening to social media for conversations, will help you engage better with your audience. You need to infuse your personality and some humor into your content! Don’t be afraid to be your natural self.
Improve Your Understanding of Your Customers
When you monitor comments among your customers within a group, forum, or even social media posts, you can get a deeper understanding of what your customers need. What are they saying? What are they asking? Where are their pain points? Use that data to help you decide what you are going to say. Consider doing Facebook live videos once a week, or bi-weekly, to answer questions and comments you’re seeing. Don’t forget to give a shout out to people on a live video. People love it when you mention them by name and thank them for their comments.
Deliver More Relevant Content
The understanding you develop from the above tips can help you improve the type of content you create overall, not just in real time but planned content too (such as blog posts, social media posts, and interaction). What’s working? What are your customers relating to? Don’t always post recipes, jokes that aren’t relevant to your business. It may be fun, but it’s not why your audience is following you online.
Connect Better With Your Customers
This can help you communicate better with customers in a way that makes them feel important and understood. You’re showing them you are genuinely concerned about their questions, hesitations, and even fears.
Create Innovative New Products
Connecting with customers can help you communicate better with them in a way that makes them feel important and understood. You’re showing them you are concerned about their questions, hesitations, and even fears.
Let me give you another example.
Say you created a new ergonomic way to shovel snow, you may want to start doing Facebook live videos a few months before winter starts. These videos can show in real time how your product works, why it’s a must-have in shovels, and you get a chance to answer their questions live. You are not just telling but showing your audience what you are selling. It’s like being at a trade show and now you have the power of speaking to thousands of people at one time and directing them where to buy.
Get More Leads
Executing in real-time can help generate more leads because you will find ways to get your products or services to relate to what is happening in the moment. You’ll market in a way that they need RIGHT NOW.
Improve Conversions
When your audience feels as if you know them and share their values, they will be more likely to purchase from you. Do you “get” them? Do you understand their struggles? Focus on that with stories and vulnerability. Everyone loves a story and now is the time to share the story of your business and why you do what you do.
Grow Your Business
All these activities will help you grow your business faster than you may have thought possible. Any one of your real-time marketing activities can become viral.
Using what you know about your audience, the current news in your industry, and world events, and how it can relate to your audience, can only help your business grow faster. Not only will you make more sales, but you will also create more products and services that are relevant to your target audience.
Because you always have your ear to the ground and are monitoring the mood of the audience, you not only send out information that connects your products and services with what is happening today, but you can create new products and services based on the information that you gather. It’s a perfect blend of your business and your customer
