Traditional to Real-Time: 5 Actions To Move To Real-Time Marketing
Although I’m still a little thrown off because I wasn’t in DC all last week, I had a great experience in Boston last week at Hubspot’s Inbound. With over 5,300 marketers, I’m still trying to form everything I learned into comprehensive words to help TrackMaven’s marketing. And a small side note — If you get a chance to go next year to Inbound, I highly recommend that you do!
After learning so many different things at Inbound, it really resonated with me on how much marketing is shifting. Marketing is making a huge shift to a more real-time focused basis that is reactive to leads and potential customers. Traditional marketing is hanging on by a thread and marketers must be fluent in digital to adapt to the increasing marketing needs of buyers.
Looking at your marketing in the present and what is happening in a real-time focus allows more agility and adaptability to a ever-changing market. Taking a look at these 5 actions will help shift your marketing away from the traditional efforts into a more real-time marketing advantage.
This type of real-time marketing can be easily confused with news jacking, or even our “real-time” marketing formula; however, I’m referring more towards changing gears from traditional methods to ones that work now in an almost completely digital age. 76% of Marketers believe that incorporating real-time marketing intelligence into your efforts is high on the priority list.
5 Actions To Move To Real-Time Marketing
1. Intent Based Marketing
Currently, when buyers reach out to a sales person they are 57% of the way through the buying process already. And the concept of intent based selling was tossed at me at Inbound and corresponds extremely well with the stat above and intent-based marketing. Intent based selling, is selling to prospects based on when they show intent to purchase and intent based marketing functions in almost exactly the same capacity. Intent based marketing can be defined as monitoring a potential lead’s behavior and aiming to market to them when they show an intent to purchase. Finding the right targets in ads, your buyer personas, and a comprehensive knowledge of your buyers journey into purchasing your product can quickly show the potential intentions on how you should handle your marketing. Buyers are smarter than ever, so make sure you know when they are ready to solve their pain points. As I have mentioned several times, Marketing and Sales should always be aligned, frankly there is not reason why they shouldn’t, so knowing your buyers journey through the entire way through the funnel will help bring about a more closed-loop scheme of marketing and will better outline what the intent of your highest converting buyers are.
Knowing your audience, who your buyer personas are, where they like to hang out, how they get a hold and of you are all on the right path in finding the prospects who have the intent to buy your product.
2. Be a Human Being
To be honest, I’m really not a big movie watcher, frequently if someone asks me if I’ve seen “x movie” there’s about an 85% chance I have not seen it. However, with that other 25%, there is one category of movies that I avoid. Anything to do with futuristic, robots, non-humanistic — count me out. Robots freak me out. I love humans, they’re my favorite animal besides corgis and as a people person I want to interact with humans not robots. And I think I can make a pretty safe bet that many others, your buyers included want to interact with humans more too. So few marketers do this, so it’s making me think that it’s harder to accomplish than I originally thought.
There are about 7 billion humans in the world and I can’t even find a statistic that shows all of the human to human interactions in the world. To wit, TrackMaven’s second most top viewed page is our About page with our pretty good looking team picture I might add. About 70% of people go on social media sites to connect and engage with friends and family, so why would they want to connect with some faceless entity? Humans interact with each in the present, so be human with your marketing. You can react quicker to responses, adapt your voice to other humans, and people will appreciate that your marketing is down-to-earth.
Most of our interactions take place behind a screen, but that surely doesn’t mean you turn into a computer yourself. Use your human words, pick up the phone to call, tweet in your voice, engage and converse. Humans want to interact with other humans, even if it’s digitally based.
3. Engage
This goes along well with being human; however, you can’t really be human without some quality human interaction. And interaction with humans mainly revolves around engaging conversations.
Ultimately one of my priorities/theme as a marketer is to never be unresponsive — I try to ALWAYS respond. Every response that comes through a TrackMaven marketing channel will be responded to, whether it be positive or negative. Think about it…no one likes to be ignored and if you can’t handle negative feedback find someone on your team who can handle the negatively in a diplomatic way. 90% of CEOs never respond to cold-calling or cold emails, so when someone posts a response to you or tries to communicate with you why wouldn’t you want to at least keep that communication open even if it is negative? If they took the time to reach out to you at least throw them some type of bone.
Now, we live in a time where a negative blog post that can gain enough traction could make or break your marketing, or an unanswered comment could make a once happy prospect leave your site forever. I can’t think of one person who likes to live in ambiguity, well at least in my type-A world, but don’t leave your potential customers in limbo. Plus, you never know who they know who could potentially be valuable to your company. Responding and engaging in that moment can only uplift your marketing.
4. Less is More
The other day, I caught myself trying to limit various responses to 140 characters…but I wasn’t on Twitter. Either I’m crazy, (ok I actually am a little), or this is a viable case for less is more. Although some will protest that long content is extremely valuable and it is, but who has the time to read over 10,000 words a day, every single day. No one. (If you do, can you please tell me where you find all that time? Or if you’re willing to lend me some?)
Less is more will help shift your marketing to a more real-time focus, allowing you to quickly maneuver through the ever-changing flow of leads. Did you know that shorter Facebook posts get 23% more interaction? Begone with all the marketing clutter.
5. Benchmarks
So you’ve begun to shift to those actions above, but where is your marketing now? Granted this requires some historical data on how some of your campaigns are performing; however looking at benchmarks can tell you how you are stacking up with your marketing and what you should do next. Should you center your focus on Twitter because that is seems to be fueling your competitor’s traffic and a little bump in yours would be nice? Or are you lacking in press mentions and your competitors had about 5 this week? Look at your competitive benchmarks, so you can quickly react to making the best decisions for your marketing now.
Some elements of traditional marketing can almost be cringeworthy. I shiver at the thought of a direct mail campaign…unless it involves directly mailing you tons of corgis. Embracing digital marketing with a real-time focus can usher in more leads into your funnel, make your marketing mix more agile, and when something new pops up into the marketing hemisphere you’ll be ready to embrace it.
Sabel Harris leads the marketing at TrackMaven. When she's not marketing, she's probably listening to some pop music or drinking too much coffee. (Funny thing, she does this while marketing too). Tweet or email her, unless, she's eating, she'll respond in record timing. See more of Sabel's posts
