A real-time marketing campaign can have great affects on increasing engagement and personalizing content to not only audience, but also timing. Following are some recent, more successful real-time and event based marketing campaigns.

  • #AllIn: The Germany vs. Brazil 2014 World Cup game broke the Twitter record for most talked about sporting event, surpassing the Super Bowl with 35.6 million tweets just during actual game time. While this is a combination of thousands of companies and sponsors, much can be said for Adidas’ #AllIn campaign.  Adidas set out to dominate the World Cup by setting up a marketing hub camp in Rio De Janiero. Dominate they did. The campaign brought in 1.6 million tweets, retweets and brand mentions, making it the most talked about brand on Twitter during the games.
  • #udGetElectric: In February, Urban Decay launched a social media contest to engage the spring music festival goers of Coachella with their Get Electric campaign. The company urged enthusiasts to pin their festival looks, both makeup and clothing, for their chance to win tickets to Coachella. Strategized to incorporate current trends and events; automated contest promotion posts were pushed out to coincide with festival promotions increasing the relevancy and chance of success. The brand gained over 51,000 Pinterest followers on one board alone during the run of the contest.
  • Arby’s Hat: While much of real-time marketing is actually strategized months ahead of time, on-the-fly true real time can also be effective if handled correctly. During the 2014 Grammys, Arby’s famously tweeted “Hey @Pharrell, can we have our hat back?” in response to the iconically familiar hat that musician Pharrell donned on the red carpet. In addition, the brand purchased the hat for over $44,000 and donated the entire amount to his charity. The immediate tweet and PR-smart follow up gained Arby’s 160 million impressions and more than 40,000 social media mentions.

What can your brand take from this? A few lessons in what works:

  • Cash in on special events: Don’t just focus on large events such as the World Cup and the Grammys, create more hype and engagement through timely posts on community happenings and events as well as brand sponsored or hosted events. For example, if your brand holds an annual event, look into creating a social media contest in conjunction. This could not only increase your brand awareness through shares and followers, but could also increase the chances of success for the event.
  • Prepare flexibly: Real-time does not mean that the concept is not thoroughly strategized and prepared for ahead of time. It does mean, in many cases, that the strategy must be able to go a multitude of ways depending on the outcome of the event. The most simple of examples being the World Cup. Marketers planned for months, even years, but had to be prepared to run campaigns multiple ways depending on who advanced in the games.
  • Time your stories: One of the more important aspects of real-time marketing is crafting the right story at the right time. There are a multitude of examples of real-time marketing gone badly. One being the Dutch airliner, KLM’s response to the Netherlands advancing over Mexico in the World Cup. The win was a potentially great time for KLM to shine, however their  “story” was not thought out and garnered the wrong type of publicity for being offensive. After the win, KLM tweeted “Adios Amigos” in accompaniment to a photo of an airport departure sign with a stereotypical man with a sombrero and mustache on it. Be conscious of language and imagery just as you would with any other type of marketing. There is a fine line between humorous and offensive and if crossed can mean huge implications for your brand’s reputation.
  • Have a protocol: While real-time marketing needs to be fast, it still needs to be quality content. Having a protocol in place prevents mistakes such as grammar issues from happening. Take the recent tweet from the Associated Press (AP) for example. The AP was trying to say that the Dutch military plane carrying the deceased from the Malaysian airliner crash had landed, but instead tweeted “Dutch military plane carrying bodies from Malaysia Airlines Flight 12 crash lands in Eindhoven,” causing a mass confusion that could have been easily avoided. Take that extra step.

Confused about what step to take first when it comes to real-time marketing? Don’t worry we watch all the latest trends so that you don’t have to. We’d love to fill you in.