What is Real-time Targeted Marketing?

Real-time targeted marketing can obviously mean a lot of things. This information is based on our technical experience, and without giving out specific solution details we’ll describe real-time online marketing in a way that could inspire some solution ideas for your now web business or clients.

Change is constant, and the pace of change is increasing. As a result, the ability to rapidly perceive and respond to this change requires a processing ability that goes beyond any group of marketing professionals with their “ear to the pavement.” While the immediate intuition of an online marketing or dynamic PR expert can be enough, real-time requires lightning fast automation, marketing intelligence and communication.

In the online world, marketing is a science and an art. While traditional advertising agencies might have enormous creative talent, in general they have struggled to transition to be effective in the online world. The emerging requirements for success surrounding real-time marketing requirements will further distinguish traditional agencies from Interactive and Social Media marketing agencies. Now, the most cutting edge breed of online marketing agency will require a technological distinction that involves creative, real-time web service-based integration and solutions.

Consumers group together and create new trends and demands that can rapidly coalesce into phenomenal opportunity. Real-time marketing technology capitalizes on this opportunity. Utilizing real-time data and personalization in marketing messages produces more impact. Interesting real-time data is any data that can change and influence the customer response: price, inventory, popularity, social groundswell, etc. Being at least being knee-deep in the social stream, real-time-enabled marketing apps provide instant and relevant responses that answer customer demands and needs as they present themselves.

No wonder Google has amassed an enormous amount of data and processing power to be able to make real-time contextual and interest-based targeting solutions for publishers and advertisers. I expect that these solutions, especially the interest-based advertising solutions, will cost more of a premium and likely become impression-based (CPM) and not pay-per-click (PPC); this is because real-time interest-based targeting is enabled ideally in social media content networks, and while such users are likely to “view” ads they are not likely to engage with such ads unless they are related directly to their social circle or activity.

Google Insights for Search and Google Trends are destined to become powerful tools as availability of data approximates real time. Below is a quote from Larry Page at the recent ZeitGeist Europe 2009:

…people really want to stuff real time and they (twitter) have done a really good job about. We have done a relatively poor job of doing things that work on a per second basis. I have been telling our search team that they need to search on a per second basis. They laughed at me and said it’s ok it’s just a few minutes old.

I said “no” it needs to be every second. Now I think they understand that. I think we will do a better job at some of those things now that we have these examples. It does take time to really integrate information. If you really want up to the second information it is not going to be as good as if you wait up to a couple of minutes. That’s an important aspect of what’s going on, you need to make people get sense of things.

An advanced, integrated solution is required to be able to “listen” to a collective voice and to “respond” in a relevant and engaging way. As more web service APIs become available, the possibilities to effectively exploit real-time demand scenarios become very interesting. We are especially interested in solutions that connect a database to a decision engine that is integrated with Google AdWords and other PPC networks, along with Analytics data to complete a feedback loop.

But the real real-time marketing action is happening around the Twitter ecosystem where the most demanded now web services are open, dynamic, responsive and intelligent to immediately extract, filter, amplify or attribute meaning to the activity stream.

MarketFlare offers customized technology and services that are focused on real-time targeted marketing. If you are interested in this topic, we’d love to hear from you!

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