5 ways to create great real-time marketing campaigns

Brands and businesses serious about getting noticed in the fast-paced digital arena are turning to more strategic and creative ways to leverage real time campaign management, according to Alterian’s CSO, Jeff Hassemer.

Speaking with CMO, Hassemer highlighted five ways can ensure more powerful audience engagement and effective brand awareness in real time

1. Take the time to look at your data

“We’re not taking the time to marry the slow data with the fast data,” Hassemer said. “In real time, we tend to only focus on the fast data – what the customer is looking at right now on social or on the website. But you need to look at both in order to create a better personalisation strategy.”

As an example, Hassemer explained discount customers tend to cost businesses money, because they are looking for deeper and deeper discounts.

“So if they abandon their cart, you don’t want to discount straight away,” he said. “Reserve those for first-time buyers.”

2. Adapt to your customer’s journey

One of the areas Hassemer stressed he’s seen brands fail is adapting to the customer’s journey.

“Customers are outpacing traditional ways we are marketing to them via the customer journey map,” he said. “There are new paradigms that are coming and we need to give customers a more personalised experience."

Because of the tools we use, we have a customer journey map concept that sometimes makes us forget how the customer has interacted with us. We need to adapt to our changing environment to provide a stronger customer experience.”

3. Use an opportunity tree

Alterian recently worked with a Scottish utility company where they leveraged an ‘opportunity tree’ to discover all the ways they could better engage with audiences on social media.

“The way this worked was if an individual has a complaint on social media, we immediately flag that and try to address the complaint in a personalised way,” he said.

As a result of this new strategy, the company saw a 25 per cent lift in retention of those customers that complained, Hassemer claimed.

“Whether it is about a bill, or a service, we encouraged the customer to communicate with the business via a conversation so it could remedy the reason why the customer complained,” he added.

4. Play the game

Another Alterian client, a sporting merchandise retailer, leveraged it's customer’s love of sports by emailing them in a personalised way before and during their favourite game.

“The company would email offers for things like jerseys with their favourite player on them,” he said. “And if a customer's favourite team scored a goal, it would again trigger an email message to the customer to celebrate that with more offers.”

As a result, Hassemer said the brand saw a very interesting lift in customer engagement.

“They actually saw very high purchase rates during the games where the customer’s favourite team was winning,” he added.

5. Get creative via your content management system

In order to embrace a more creative and engaging marketing strategy, Hassemer highlighted Alterian takes a deep look into it’s clients’ content management system in an effort to develop a more creative and effective real time strategy.

“We personalise campaigns using their existing channels and serve content from the CMS via our system to make things more efficient and seamless,” he said. “Its about giving customers a non-linear approach to marketing.

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