Real-Time Marketing and Personalization: The Right Message at the Right Time

Nowadays, the concept of real-time marketing is most prominently connected to social media, where a variety of communication channels are being used to listen to and anticipate customer needs by creating relevant messages that are reacting in real-time to current events, trends, and feedback. Undoubtedly, being able to “capture, monitor, analyze and act on information in real-time” allows for a streamlined buyer’s journey and generates quicker buying decisions. In a nutshell: the pace at which companies are able to reach customers with the right messages is a serious competitive advantage that sets them apart from rivals who are not engaging in real-time marketing. Use cases are versatile and spread from generating demand over advertising to sales and service. Several techniques and technologies are being employed to analyze behavioral patterns and connect them practically simultaneously to automated marketing reactions.

While badly timed messages and slow reactions to customer feedback can cause entire companies to fail, on the other hand, state-of-the-art real-time marketing concepts can significantly increase the agility of the customer experience within the entire sales funnel.

In a day and age in which ideas and messages can go viral online within just a few minutes, consequently, huge opportunities can open up for businesses that have their finger at the pulse of the time and are able to adjust their marketing communications accordingly and do so swiftly. It also entails that products and services are developed and refined in a responsive and speedy manner in order to maximize attractiveness for the market which may or may not be a short-lived one to begin with. Fun fact: some brands even go so far on their quest for contextual relevance that they participate in so-called “newsjacking” where they attempt to “hijack” the attention for certain breaking news for pushing their very own PR into the same limelight.

A funny example of newsjacking is the instantaneous newspaper campaign of Norwegian Airlines after Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie split up in 2016.

The Right Message for the Right Segment at the Right Time

With the above outlined significance in the timely and creative race for consumer attention in mind, it is astonishing that the term “real-time marketing” is only used in a secondary manner to address email and web personalization that is providing contextual relevance in online communications.

Despite the comparative neglect: it is just as decisive for a brand’s communicative success whether or not browser-based personalization enables a brand to promptly adjust its online presence to a recognized segment/target group when a pattern is based on data-based signals and the web experience could be successfully identified. 

So, to deliver real-time personification at scale the technical delivery is critical. The right message for the right segment, at the right time, can not take seconds or hundreds of milliseconds as it happens with javascript-based solutions.

Needless to say, this boosts marketing success in a multitude of ways - without paying the price of longer loading times or glitches.

At Ninetailed we have built our solution on the Edge to be “real-time”. With our Edge Proxy Network from over 200 worldwide locations, we identify the visitor and show the personalized content to the visitor in less than 100 milliseconds.

Therefore we think what we do at Ninetailed deserves to add some new meaning to the concept of “real-time marketing” and personification.