Analytics Managers - Today, Real-time Marketing Analytics Rules

Marketing Analytics Managers are now able to track market trends and insights of the last minute by utilizing real-time analytics techniques. As a graduate student at Northwestern University, Medill IMC with the specialization of Marketing Analytics, I have been following the news and papers of the practice of real-time marketing and I am happy to share two articles I like.

Big companies are the first ones to put the real-time analytics into practice. Paid more than $200 million for Topsy, Apple's acquisition of this real-time social media analytics start-up is considered as a long-term strategic investment. In Adam Satariano's article "Apple Buys Real-Time Access to Twitter's Feed With Topsy Deal", Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst with EMarketer Inc., believed that Apple will use the real-time social media analytics for analytics of the iAd mobile-advertising service, to make purchase recommendations from iTunes and App Store, or other marketing acts. Instead of getting market reports from the analytics group once a week, real-time analytics will easily provide more accurate insights for analytics managers to tailor messages to target audience.

Real-time marketing analytics is not only desirable for technology companies like Apple, Coca-Cola and Pepsi are both touching the area of real-time analytics. The article "Big Marketers Have Real-Time Data for Just About Everything" by Christopher Heine shows us how the real-time analytics company, Bottlenose engaged with big names like Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Bottlenose monitors and analyzes data includes all brand mentions that is collected from most of TV and radio around the world. They can even visualize the market-leading sentiment analysis at real time. "Bottlenose does real-time trend intelligence for brands across social, television and radio in one system. We figure out what's trending across all media in real time and show you what drives what." says Nova Spivack, CEO of Bottlenose.

Based on my study and review of these two articles, here are 3 things marketing analytics mangers should do to have the best performance of real-time analytics.

1. Analyze Best-of-Breed Examples. Learning from real cases is always a good way to learn and improve, especially for new techniques. Analyze the big companies' real-time marketing acts will help us understanding better about how to drive the most benefit for our company from real-time analytics.

2. Identify real-time analytics demands. Even if your company is not using real-time analytics now, you should pay attention to the times when real-time analytics could help you improve your marketing performance. Knowing that will make you have a better use of real-time analytics.

3. Explore new real-time marketing strategies. Not only to improve the performance of existing marketing acts, it is also useful to take a look at the real-time data and come up with brand new real-time strategies.

Data are everywhere the whole time. When we gradually started to benefit from big data, real-time data is now the time to be the new weapon for Marketing Analytics Managers.

Jason Zhixun Wang (@jasonzhixunwang) is a marketing analyst who is passionate in utilizing data mining techniques to interpret mess big data into actionable marketing insights. He learned and practiced restructuring, aggregating big data with analytical tools such as SAS, R and SPSS and interpreting the data. He has done marketing analytics projects for companies with professors at Medill IMC Spiegel Digital & Database Research Center.