CMOs: 3 Tips to leverage real time marketing and improve KPIs

As a CMO, you are always trying to follow trends in the marketplace and making use of new technologies and tools to drive up your marketing results. As a graduate student in the Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) program at Medill, Northwestern University, I keep digging into the cutting-edge field of digital, social and mobile marketing and have found 2 articles that may be insightful to you.

With vivid examples, Peter Miller stressed in his article, “Five lessons learned from leading brands' real-time marketing efforts”, that by using real time marketing marketers must differentiate their brands, add value to customers and brands, consider the long term value of every content, keep to beconsistent if not outstanding, and last but not least, stick to their strategy and show off the brands’ personalities and humors.

Source:http://www.juanmarketing.com/

Anne-Marie Kline played with the concepts of real-time marketing and right time marketing in her article “Failed at real-time marketing? Try right-time instead”, but what she meant by “right time marketing” is to provide right content at the right time to right customers, which is making good use of real-time marketing. Her insights about real-time marketing can be concluded into 5 parts: people don’t share ads, events can make temporary great content, data prevent waste, content can come from everywhere and the entire web is social.

Based on these 2 articles and my graduate education, here are 3 tips from me to help you leverage real-time marketing and better reach your target customers:

• Create Relevant Content - Make sure your content is really relevant to customers so you can better trigger their interest.
• Use data wisely – Leveraging data can help to personalize the content you would like to send out to your prospects and optimize timing.
• Deliver consistent content - Keep your content consistent to your market strategy and your brand image, otherwise your target market might be confused.

The 3 simple tips will help you to avoid send irrelevant content to your target market and cut down costs as well as eliminate any possible harm to your company’s reputation. Follow the 3 tips and you can deliver the right content to right audience at the right time. Sounds great? Then just start from now!

Junhui ‘Jenny’ Zhu is a full-time M.S. candidate in Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) at Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, focusing on digital marketing and data analytics. She is interested in how market research and big data can help in optimizing marketing plans. She will graduate in Dec. 2015 and would like to work in the market research field. You can contact her at:

LinkedIn: Junhui Zhu   Twitter: @jennyjunhuizhu