The Real-Time Marketing Formula
I began writing this post centering around the topic of Wimbledon and how to rally, volley and ace your calendar competitively. It really all started to fall into place that was until I started to realize that I’ve covered some ground already with the category of real-time marketing. I even almost finished the post about how tennis relates in forming your editorial calendar competitively. From rallying, volleying and acing your competition, I really felt like I was Serena Williams slamming the ball into my competition with this blog post that I wrote up…
Until my mind started to plant doubtful seeds. Did I talk about too many real-time marketing happenings? Am I just centering some of this content on just pop cultural events? Maybe, I am, but as my mind was pushing through some of these ideas I happened upon another idea — The Real-Time Marketing Formula.
From writing about the marketing around Arrested Development to the Final Four, what makes real-time marketing tick? What’s the formula that drives engagement and traffic into your content? What were the factors I added together before I implemented an idea into a current event? After analyzing some of the pieces I’ve done and breaking down the piece I almost published today, lead me to this formula that you can use to use real-time marketing in your content.
(RTM Event - Time Traffic Decay) + (Key Parts of the Event x Pieces of Your Own Brand/Marketing) = Your Company/Brand’s Real-Time Marketing
Breaking down this formula into what will later equal your real-time marketing efforts…
1. The Event
Is there a big event coming up? What will be going on in the next month that your audience base most likely interacts with? Are there holidays coming up in the next month that you would like to capitalize on with your marketing? Or is there something going on with your social audience that people haven’t been able to stop talking about currently? For example, the premiere for Arrested Development was May 26th, as an avid fan myself that date was ingrained in my mind as soon as they announced it. As my mind was on all things Arrested Development, I couldn’t help but to admire their own marketing efforts, hence the post about Arrested Development’s marketing. Choosing events that will fit with your own marketing or what you are trying to talk about will factor in towards another part of the equation, but they do come in with the first part in choosing the event of your choice.
Like today, Wimbledon started and I thought it would be a good event that I could write about on the blog.
1.1 Time Traffic/Engagement Decay
This is actually a really important factor in the Real-Time Marketing Formula in that it directly relates to what event you are covering and the potential amount of traffic/visitors/engagement you could get with a post. The Time Traffic Decay relates to how the amount of potential traffic you can get with the event you chose will start to decay and decrease as time progresses on. So if Oreo chose to send their “Dunk After Dark” tweet after the Super Bowl it probably wouldn’t have gotten as much engagement as it did during the event because as time sets on the “real-time” event isn’t in the current moment.
I could write about Wimbledon two weeks from now and how it relates to setting up your editorial calendar creatively. Would you be as engaged or would I get more traffic to the blog? Probably not because people will be done with Wimbledon and moved on to the next tennis match. Make sure you are choosing an event that you can work with right away or you have some wiggle room in the timing. Your audience expects timeliness (42% of consumers believe brands should respond to their questions or concerns within an hour on any given day) and this is an obvious point in how your traffic will start to decay/decrease as soon as the event happens.
So you would need to figure out when your event is and then subtract about half of that time in order to determine the first part of the equation. Granted, if the event is happening now, you have about half of that time in order to get the optimal amount of traffic/engagement…so you need to act on that real-time event at that moment. Did you know stories about sports have the shortest half-life? Maybe it’s a good thing I avoided posting about Wimbledon.
The second part of the formula come in after you’ve picked the event you want to cover and when you are going to post whatever you are going to market…
2. Key Parts of The RTM Event, Holiday, Etc.
Depending on the event you chose, you still have to use some of that event’s parts or it wouldn’t have much relation to your own business or marketing. If I wanted to continue writing about Wimbledon, I needed to breakdown some of it’s parts in order to understand how it could potentially relate to marketing and competitive intelligence. For example, I was going to relate game moves in tennis like rallying, volleying and hitting an ace. Now, I’m not tennis expert, but it took a little more digging on my part to break down some of it’s components to try and relate it to my own marketing.
2.1 Pieces of Your Own Brand/Marketing
I’m not sure if it would provide much benefit to the TrackMaven blog if I continued writing just about one of the championships of tennis. So even though you have broken down some of the current event’s parts, you cannot just stop there. They have to have some sort of correlation to what you want to achieve with your marketing. How can you input your voice in the event? What are some of the ideas that you write about that you can incorporate with the event or holiday? Is it easily relatable? If you are having a hard time answering any of these questions it might be a good idea to pass on this event. That doesn’t mean you will have to pass up on real-time marketing all together; however, because there is an explicit risk in participating in it you don’t want it to be a far stretch for your audience to try and understand what is going on. One example that I keep running across
Your brand/company has to connect in an impactful way that will capture your audience’s attention. That’s why in this part of the equation you’ll multiply both sides to make sure that the results will have a effective meaning.
Setting up this real-time marketing equation, with a little haste of course, allows for you to evaluate if you have a pretty decent piece of real-time marketing on your hands. Maybe you won’t lose in the first round…oops sorry Nadal.
What’s your take on real-time marketing? Leave me a comment below, bark at Maven, or give me a shout on Twitter (@sabelharris)