Companies interested in real-time Marketing take advantage of relevant trends and immediate feedback from customers. What does it take to do it?

All of us live in a dynamic environment. Change comes more rapidly often making planning difficult. Agile companies want to be able to rapidly adjust on all fronts. This is the realm of real-time marketing. Companies are interested in real time marketing because they believe it will help them deploy the right elements of the marketing mix at the right time to influence a specific outcome.

The Three Active Ingredients of Real-Time Marketing

Real time marketing encompasses three activities: real time data capture, real time insight development, and real time interaction development. What are these three elements?

Real-Time Data Capture: The ability to obtain information about a prospect or a customer as the information is being generated and transforming and storing that information in a format and location that is accessible to other marketing activities.
Real-Time Insight Development: Creating actionable knowledge that leverages the most recent real-time data. Knowledge development can vary from rescoring an individual based on a real-time data element change to creating new data mining algorithms based on how the latest real-time data and insights element change affects the overall pattern identification results.
Real-Time Interaction Enablement: Creating the means to leverage available knowledge for an individual or bulk inbound or outbound prospect or customer marketing or sales exchange.

All three of these help you create a real-time marketing system. To implement real-time marketing you will want to create scenarios around the data scope and Marketing function periodicity.

Scenarios Serve to Enable Real-Time Marketing, Agility and Planning

real time marketing with scenarios — Craft scenarios to help with real-time marketing.

Scenarios are a postulated sequence or development of events. Scenarios help you anticipate and analyze possible future events. As a result they play an essential role if you’re aspiring to be more agile AND are an excellent vehicle to support planning.

Creating scenarios that will be useful requires data and timing information. Scenarios to support real-time marketing can be created based on the answers to the following types of questions.

What data can change and by how much regarding customers, the market, and the competition?
What data are predictive of a key prospect or customer behavior?
What data are essential for effective engaging with customers and prospects?
What data are required to support a consistent cross-channel customer experience?

Marketing function periodicity scenarios can be created based on the answers to the following questions. The periodicity questions typically lead to the development of scenarios where a series of time increments are examined such as real time, daily, weekly and monthly.

How frequently does data or value of the data change?
How quickly do predictive models lose their effectiveness?
How quickly are decisions about campaign effectiveness made?

Once created, the costs and benefits associated with each scenario are quantified and compared to identify the appropriate real-time marketing investments required to provide superior ROI. How well you can craft scenarios will determine your success with this approach. Not up your alley. It’s right up ours. Give us call.

FAQ:

Q1: What is real-time marketing and why is it valuable?
A: Real-time marketing is the practice of leveraging current trends and immediate customer feedback to rapidly adjust marketing tactics. It enables companies to deploy the right elements of the marketing mix at the right moment to influence outcomes in dynamic environments.

Q2: What are the three essential elements of real-time marketing?
A: Real-time marketing is built on:

Real-Time Data Capture: Collecting and storing prospect or customer information as it is generated, making it accessible for immediate use.
Real-Time Insight Development: Transforming the latest data into actionable knowledge, from rescoring individuals to updating predictive models.
Real-Time Interaction Enablement: Using insights to drive timely, relevant inbound or outbound marketing and sales exchanges.

Q3: How do scenarios support real-time marketing and agility?
A: Scenarios are structured sequences of possible events that help anticipate and analyze future developments. They support agile planning by clarifying how data changes, what information predicts behavior, and what’s needed for a consistent customer experience across channels.

Q4: What types of questions should companies ask when crafting real-time marketing scenarios?
A: Key questions include:

What data can change and by how much (customers, market, competition)?
Which data are predictive of key behaviors?
What information is essential for engagement and cross-channel consistency?
How frequently does data value change, and how quickly do models lose effectiveness?

Q5: How should companies evaluate real-time marketing investments?
A: Quantify the costs and benefits of each scenario. Compare alternatives to determine which real-time marketing investments will deliver the best ROI. Success depends on scenario quality and alignment with business goals.

Q6: Where can I get expert help implementing real-time marketing?
A: VisionEdge Marketing specializes in scenario development, data-driven planning, and real-time marketing systems. Contact us for support in building agile, ROI-driven marketing capabilities.