How companies (fail to) use real time marketing

The importance of timing when using real time marketing

Over the past few years several brands and companies have been using real time marketing. Real time marketing is reacting to a current hype, news or a trending topic, mostly by using social media. It requires being fast, being clever and having a sense of humor. But which one of those factors is more important?

On the long term

Real time marketing is mostly done on social media, because that’s the fastest way to react to a new event. But you can also react to a topic that has been going on for a longer period of time and it will still be called real time marketing. As long as it’s a subject people talk about on a daily basis. For these kind of topics, using other types of media is an option instead of using social media.

Using the election for publicity as a company can be quite a risk. Because as a company, you want to stay away from political issues, since it can cost you some of your clients and it’s more professional to be apolitical.

The realtor company Jeff Cook Real Estate used the election in a somewhat funny way, as you can see in the picture above. They are not stating a certain political view. Instead, they are saying that it’s going to be a bad ending either way and assume people want to move out of the country.

Since the election has been going on for a while now, this company has had time to make a billboard advertisement instead of using social media.

Missing the opportunity

As mentioned in the introduction, real time marketing requires being fast. If you are too late with reacting to a new event, it’s a missed opportunity. When you react immediately or in a short amount of time, the reaction is spontaneous and therefore it has impact. However, if you wait for a couple of hours, your target audience won’t be impressed anymore, because you missed the moment. The reaction will be too calculated and your audience will notice that. This is exactly what happened with the reaction of the restaurant ‘Red Lobster’ in the lyrics of the song Formation by Beyoncé. Beyoncé mentioned Red Lobster in her song during a performance and Red Lobster’s reaction was eight hours later and therewith eight hours too late.

To conclude you can say that there are no particular guidelines for using real time marketing. It is a combination of several factors, such as timing and humor. But personally I think creativity is the most important factor, because that is what makes the reaction lasting. You can be late, but still come up with something creative that was worth the wait.