Is âreal time marketingâ transforming the customer experience?

Or is it trinket temptation for ‘magpie marketers’? The DMA and DigitasLB ran an inspirational event last week, they shared some awesome technology & processes around watching the volume and combination of people’s smartphone interaction.

Sharing some key phrases thrown out about ‘real time marketing’ (rtm) from Anne-Marie Kline, DigitasLB founder:

• the purpose is to improve lives of consumers – ‘give me what I want, where I want it when I want it…’
  
• real time is ‘right time’ (the content could have been created a while ago – the journey is a combination of proactive, planned and reactive, opportunistic, newsroom content…)
  
• social = people’s behaviour, not a techy platform… it’s about audiences, not platforms or channels…
  
• relevance has a deadline (content lasting 2-8 hours depending on social channel)…
  
• it’s about volume and combination, not just one tweet!…
  
• the social tidal wave of #icebucketchallenge works because it’s fun, easy, grassroots seeded and personal.

Corporates (like P&G and Nissan) are testing lots of ways to harness this behaviour to wow the customer experience for their brands. But it needs transformational commitment…

24/7 culture

To be ‘on all day every day’ requires a serious step change in philosophy, attitude and workstyles – people both inside the client organisation and in their supplier organisations working together like a newsroom – legal, marketing, comms, all onboard working together for a mutually understood purpose – this is a HUGE benefit, everyone putting themselves in customers’ shoes to engage and involve them in the brands spirit…

… and of course there’s a serious financial commitment too. We saw some eye watering technology to track and analyse content and trends worth plugging into and enable opportunistic reaction. We heard how strategy, data, social, creative, newsroom team play is critical for exploding response from users.

Who cares?

But what about the (target) consumers who don’t give a damn about living in the social ether? Despite media and technology explosion there are still only 24 hours in the day and not everyone wants to spend all their time messaging with their favourite brands. Or do they?

We saw a case study on Yorkshire Building Society (actually the 2^nd largest in the UK, did you know that?), very involved in the Tour de France starting in Yorkshire this year. The agency created yellow sheep and a giant field poster - obviously the filming helicopters couldn’t ignore that, as couldn’t the usual media channels. So even though the social sharing was massive, social and real time was a justifiable part of the media mix, NOT the only media.

Beware of marketing magpies!

And that’s the whole point. Mobile and smartphone is a massive connection and enablement tool. Depending on your target market and proposition you have to work out its relative importance. But if I’m a shareholder of your company I want to know that you are not investing in rtm because it’s the latest bright jewellery for magpie marketers to play with, I want to know that you are using rtm to improve customer experience and create extra profitability. And until you know that, tinkering and testing is fine, but the real world is the real world and lots of (target) people don’t give a damn about brands being commercial on their private smartphone or in their social space.

Jon Burkhart described an amazing example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkGaFRwIs7c of using iBeacon in shopping malls with an interruptive push technique and connection strategy – to squirt messages to people going to the client’s competitive stores to come to theirs, for example with a descending discount % on how fast they rush to the client’s store. So how’s that iBeacon technology going to evolve over the next few years? Is that going to wow the customer experience?

Let consumers choose

The customer decides the customer journey, they want to be able to interact on any device when they choose. In a world where omnichannel demand is constantly challenging marketers, rtm fuses online multimedia messages and people can interact if they want to, or choose to be involved in more conventional ways depending on your messages and stimuli and how you share them.

The cross functional teamwork essential for rtm is exciting and inspiring… everyone putting themselves in the customers shoes invents an ‘internal marketing’ philosophy that enhances the customer journey and is good for wowing the customer experience.

Yet if a customer really cares about your brand they’ll want to opt in to a relationship. Is a key kpi for rtm to build and build your database?... build the quality of information and knowledge you have on these people, so that you can give them what they want based on analysis and intelligence. The consumer/customer database is the real tangible asset that has sustainable value to a company. Rtm is a sharing experience for those that care and want to involved versus those that don’t. So in terms of customer value segmentation, what % of your business profit does that affect?

Will rtm create profit?

With all the amazing marketing stuff our industry colleagues do I’m always surprised how often we find that companies haven’t asked their customers how they would like to be communicated with and how often, basic polite relationship protocol towards giving people what they want and treating them how THEY would like to be treated, not how YOU want to treat them!

Rtm is fun and exciting for those customers or consumers that care. Companies have to balance this against the investment and essential resource commitment and whether rtm deployment creates more profit.