Tips to Help Your Business Engage in Better Real Time Marketing
If you are going to commit yourself to taking digital marketing seriously with your small business, you need to be able to adapt and shift your campaigns quickly. After all, things move fast on the internet, and it’s important that you’re able to stay ahead of the game. The farther you fall behind with digital marketing trends and information related to your market, the more out of touch it will make your company look.
With this in mind, here are a few tips to help your business engage in better real-time marketing:
- Be prepared: If you’re going to successfully run a real-time marketing campaign, you must stay up-to-date with the latest news in your market and in the world and pop culture in general. When a marketing opportunity arises, you must be prepared to act quickly. Therefore, have a plan in place that outlines how you will create real-time ads as soon as the opportunity presents itself.
- Produce more bite sized content: While there is definitely always a place for in-depth, long-form articles in your content marketing, the success of real-time marketing hinges primarily on your ability to create numerous bursts of short content and advertisements. Producing a lot of simple, timely content ensures you aren’t spending too much energy and time on ads that don’t perform well. This isn’t to say you should spam your online audience, just that you should have some variance in the size and style of your content marketing.
- Know what separates trending topics: Social media networks like Twitter and Facebook have made it easier than ever for marketers to identify which topics are trending on a local, national and global scale. Trending topics are just beginning to grab the public attention, and are more likely to generate more buzz and searches than topics that are already popular and already have an established base of followers. Understand what makes a “trending” topic different than a “popular” topic, and try to capitalize on these trending topics whenever appropriate.
- Have content prepared ahead of time: If you have reason to believe a topic is going to be trending in the near future, prepare content to capitalize on that topic ahead of time. For example, the Super Bowl is going to be a trending topic in the weak leading up to the first Sunday of February every single year. You can create Super Bowl-related content long before the event actually occurs so you’re ready once it begins trending.
- Think twice before you press “submit:” Make sure you understand why a topic is trending before you decide to jump aboard the trend. There have been too many incidents to count of brands committing social media snafus because they did not entirely understand a hashtag or trending topic. The last thing you want is to damage your brand image because you did not do your research.
Follow these tips, and you’ll be on your way to significantly improving your real-time digital marketing!
Queen of the Machine for Viral Solutions LLC
“If a brand genuinely wants to make a social contribution, it should start with who they are, not what they do. For only when a brand has defined itself and its core values can it identify causes or social responsibility initiatives that are in alignment with its authentic brand story.” ~ Simon Mainwaring