Real-time marketing has been surfacing a lot in my morning readings, so I wanted to write about how you can shift to this in terms of getting away from traditional marketing. In CMO.com’s article, “Poised for Action: How to organize for real-time marketing,” marketers talk about how to get organized for a specific event and what it really takes to provide real-time marketing. How can you shift traditional marketers into thinking this way? How do you get them out of campaign mentality into utilizing insights and data?
1. Access to Data – This is usually the biggest hurdle I’ve faced and I don’t mean it’s about getting the data. It’s about getting the team to utilize the tools they have to get the data. It can feel like you’ve migrated back to when the sales team would not use the CRM but it’s the same with marketers – they use what they are comfortable with. Training, setting goals and making people accountable will help but like anything they need to see how it can make them successful.
2. Real-time Dashboard – Equip your team with a real-time dashboard. When your team can see the results of their work and understand the impact of their efforts. It’s powerful to be able to view what’s happening all the time rather than waiting for that weekly report to arrive in your inbox. I know for me, it keeps my own goals top-of-mind and motivates me to always be thinking of how to surpass goals.
3. Institutionalize Communications – For email marketers, it’s not just about having a strategy or responsive template, you need to equip them with communications templates that can be customized easily rather than working by a monthly calendar and creating content 4 weeks in advance of the email going out. You’ll always have planned email communications but arming your team with channel templates and a library of content will allow them to utilize those insights and react.
4. Pre-planning – No matter how “real-time” you might want your efforts to seem there’s no substitute for pre-planning. As marketers, we all know the value of pre-planning. We when host webinars or small business classes, our content manager, plans all the social media content, works with the presenter and even pre-plans how they can supplement our social content. Pre-planning doesn’t mean you can’t do things on the fly; it allows you to think on your feet and be more strategic.
With all efforts, I always suggest to start out small. You probably aren’t staffed to do all of these at once. Pick the one that will have the greatest impact for you and your team now. The real-time dashboard is a project we’re taking on and I am so excited to see the possibilities.