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Being online means working and reacting on-the-fly. And real-time marketing is used by companies to communicate with their customers on hot topics like recent events or trends that may concern them. It’s also a great way of boosting a brand’s reach by “riding a popularity wave”. If you’re not familiar with this term – continue reading this article and find out what RTM can do for your company!

Action – reaction!

Remember Samsung ads about Apple iPhone bendgate everybody laughed about? That’s the perfect example of global real-time marketing. Such actions are about taking benefits from trending topics (serious, hilarious or bizarre) and using them for your own business purposes.

Today, when almost all your clients are connected to the internet whole the time, it’s highly probable that most of them know what’s the hottest topic on the internet at the moment. It’s crucial to make a contribution that will somehow react to the latest event.

Let’s mention Apple’s bendgate one more time. The first brand that reacted was (obviously) Samsung, after a few hours other brands from the mobile phones industry joined the action. Brands like HTC, ASUS, LG USA Mobile made their contribution using #BendGate tag, but not only them – Heineken, Coca-Cola or Pringles also joined, although it’s hard to call them Apple’s competitors. Those brands decided to use the buzz for their own marketing.

How it’s done?

So how to use SMS messaging for RTM? There are several possible answers, but all are based on SMS delivery speed (as we always mention – over 90% of people open SMS text read it within a few minutes). Let’s suppose you’re running a restaurant or pub and have your clients’ contact base, that allowed you to inform them about table reservation status, promotions or special offers. You can send something like this:

Anything that interests your clients can become a topic of real-time marketing communication. What you should avoid though are events that might be controversial or somehow unsuitable for your brand, unless you are ready to handle every kind of reaction.

Another form of real-time marketing is when the customer is performing actions on your site and your marketing messages are able to trigger and adapt to the customer in real-time.

Think about SMS messages being sent after an e-commerce shopper left an abandoned cart. Or email automation, these email set-ups used to be very expensive, but today cheap email marketing tools like MailChimp offer a great addition to any businesses real-time marketing arsenal.

Use emotions

The speed of reaction is crucial. You always have to keep in mind that it won’t matter how funny or nailing will your reaction be, if you’ll miss its publication time, and a completely new topic will get the attention.

Of course, the buzz takes place in social media, but by using a mobile communication channel you show that you know what’s hot on the internet right now. Remember – regardless of the communication channel, one thing doesn’t change – emotions. Your customers are frequently driven by them. If you reach clients and get an emotional reaction, because of the current trend – you win.

Real-time marketing reminds negotiation – using the right argument in the proper moment, might result in convincing your customer. But please be aware – when it comes to the emotion, someone can get disappointed, and if it happens so – for negative feedback he will use exactly the same communication channels, which you used to find him.