Editor's note (4/22/2015): We're proud to announce that Chris Kerns will be sharing his expertise at The Social Shake-Up 2015 in June. Register here!
Trends. They come and go-sometimes within years, sometimes days. When they're first getting off the ground most trends are ridiculed as being silly or gimmicky or just some quick way to fit in with the cool kids. Real-time marketing however, has experienced the same initial speculation that most trends go through, hearing time and time again that it possesses no real merit. It's defined as the practice of brands jumping on popular and timely topics to join a conversation. It's off-campaign, it's new and strange, and it's getting a lot of attention.
But most of the opinion about RTM is, well, just that. Opinion. People think it's silly. Pundits say it only works for the top one or two brands jumping in on a big event, and that every other brand looks desperate trying to compete. I've read articles that go as far as saying that the move towards real-time is just a backroom, coordinated effort by agencies to sell war rooms at the Super Bowl. Talk, talk, talk.
But We're Smarter Than That, Right?
I love a good opinion piece, but as the head of Analytics & Research at Spredfast, I like data a lot more. About a year ago I noticed that while there was a lot of talk about RTM, there wasn't any analytics-based view on the intersection of brands and social trends. So I decided to fix that problem, and began a research project that analyzed years of social data from more than 100 of the world's largest brands.
Were these brands seeing increased engagement and sharing by leveraging real-time topics? Was it worth it for marketers to give RTM a try? It was time for this debate to get some data. The result of that research can be found in my new book, Trendology, and the results are actually quite surprising.
Real-time marketing doesn't just work for a few brands, it works for most brands that are doing it. And the data tells me that it doesn't just kind of work -it works really, really well.
Veteran's Day on Twitter
Let's look at an example from this week: Veteran's Day. This past Tuesday, as Twitter users flocked to the social network to show their appreciation and gratitude to our nation's finest, multiple Twitter trending topics formed ("Veteran's Day", "#VeteransDay").
I saw a number of brands join the conversation to thank veterans for their service with respectful messaging, and I analyzed performance data for 26 of those brands. In each case, I used the Twitter public API to pull each brand's historical performance (their last 3,200 Tweets) to figure out what a normal level of retweets and favorites looks like for each brand. Then, I simply compared those averages to the audience's response to their Veteran's Day RTM content.
As it turns out, the results were extremely positive. The average bump in retweets for Veteran's Day content from brands was +311%, and favorites averaged a +250% bump in performance. That's obviously very impressive, but averages can allow outliers to skew our understanding of the data. What we really want to look at is the distribution of success across our 26 brands.
Of the 26 brands that I looked at, 85% of brands saw increased retweets and 88% of brands saw increased favorites when comparing their RTM Tweets on Veteran's Day to their own historical performance.
But we've always heard that real-time marketing only works for the Oreos or Arby's of the world, right? That there's only one real-time winner per trend, and it takes a big budget to make it happen, right? But in this case, it worked for the wide majority of brands. And not just for any one type of brand, but a diverse set of brands including NASCAR, The Knot, Smuckers, The Library of Congress, The Buffalo Bills football team, Goldman Sachs, and Nordstrom. You can't get much more diverse than that.
The data shows that real-time marketing actually has a very, very long tail of success. The data shows me that the audience, your audience, actually loves it when a brand joins a trending conversation with something interesting to say. I'm not talking about hijacking a hashtag here, I'm talking about adding to the discussion. And I'm seeing this happen again and again-across big events, small events, and everyday trends. No wonder more and more brands are jumping on RTM every day.
Get Ready To Shift to Real-Time
I believe that real-time conversations are here to say. To be successful requires a new mindset, a set of processes, and the right technology to stay on top of trends. It requires marketers to not only act fast, but to create solid, quick-turn creative that makes the most of each moment. And with the right architecture in place, brands will see that RTM has the ability to regularly keep brands top of mind and conversational with prospects and customers.
Or said another way: While the marketing world debates the shift to real-time, the data tells me that the audience is already there.