Here's how to succeed with real-time content marketing

Seeing Oreo's success with real-time marketing at the Superbowl in 2014, Adidas invested in a social media war room for the FIFA World Cup that same year. A combination of careful planning and quick thinking resulted in some of the fastest tweets being sent around key moments in the tournament:

Social media war rooms are a way of centralising operations for content creation and communication while enhancing agility, flexibility, and creativity. If used effectively, marketers can leverage them for real-time marketing during live sports events, nationwide celebrations, and even large-scale campaigns or product launches.

[More on this topic at Marketing magazine’s 3rd annual PR Asia 2015 conference, happening 26-27 November in Singapore.]

The trick to succeeding with social media war rooms is to look beyond the visual appeal of dynamic displays to focus on extracting and using information gained from social listening.

To succeed, here are five things to note:

1. Begin with the end in mind

Knowing what you want to gain from your command centre helps you set a blueprint for your content and communication efforts while ensuring efficiency during crucial moments. Whether it’s leading a trending conversation or expanding one’s share of voice, a targeted strategy is key to setting actionable KPIs. Social media teams with a pre-defined analytics plan for what data and insights to extract for specific purposes and can hit the ground running while avoiding the dreaded confusion of data overload.

2. Don’t just look at the big trends

It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data online. The heavy emphasis placed on quick content and wit to create an immersive (or at least relatable) experience for customers means that it is now more crucial than ever for social media teams to be able to track and respond to conversations, as well as monitor their immediate environment for opportunities to engage.

In the case of real-time marketing, a strong content strategy is determined by your ability to track your activity, reputation, and the reach of your brand’s message simultaneously - on top of what the public is actually saying. While social listening tools can help optimise content and engagement opportunities by identifying key moments and influencers, marketers themselves should also be efficient in filtering their findings so as to leverage what’s truly critical for their brand.

For example, brands seeking to engage audiences watching a live sports event from their homes can use geo-tagging to sift through social feeds by locality. Social media teams can then further extract information about the audience’s demography and interests in a particular location from which to create content. By doing so, brands can demonstrate their ability to listen and participate sincerely in online conversations, as opposed to hopping on the bandwagon with a “one size fits all” strategy.

3. Plan to be spontaneous

The point of social media is to be spontaneous, and the key to excelling at it is fostering conversations and engagement as organically as possible. Ideally, real-time content marketing should be 90% pre-approved brand messages and 10% reactive posts crafted through careful curation, social listening, and anticipating key moments and conversations from past events.

Truly engaging audiences online, however, requires a compelling call to action. The best ones propel the “silent majority” to interact with the brand on social media, from inviting them to comment on a key moment, aspect or individual at a particular event, to getting them to visit an external landing page. Marketers can take it one step further by studying how people talk about the event or campaign online, assessing the more popular and active platforms, and adapting their strategies to such behaviour.

That said, the journey of content creation does not end when it goes live. Marketers who fail to keep track of their postings, or, worse, ignore their audience’s reaction, risk losing a wealth of opportunities for engagement. Brands’ social media pages will become static at best, and a hotbed for a potential PR crises if their content is not well received . Participate in the conversation on your home ground as it develops, not just outside it.

4. Engage, don’t provoke (or pander)

While the goal of every social media team is to engage as wide an audience as possible, there is a difference between getting attention and going overboard. Being remembered for all the wrong reasons is worse than not being remembered online.

GrabTaxi’s recent Breast Cancer Awareness fiasco, for one, shows how important it is to be aware of cultural sensitivities and even political climates before implementing content strategies, more so in real-time marketing. With social media facilitating the rapid spread of news both good and bad, social media teams should also harness social listening and management tools to help implement their contingency plans in case of a social gaffe.

Besides protecting their online reputation, it is equally important for brands to retain their integrity when trying to leverage a major event in real time. As the SG50 “marketing tsunami” showed, content strategies that were lacking in clear business goals tended to create more noise than add value to the brands and the conversations.

5. Investing in your social media war room

To create and manage content in real time, social media war rooms require a dedicated team, with analysts assigned to monitoring conversations online, community managers monitoring and managing respective social pages before and after putting out content, and creatives crafting copy and visuals for different social channels. Needless to say, war rooms would also benefit from a specially allotted space during their run, as physical proximity facilitates discussion and content creation better than online channels in real-time scenarios.

The writers are Stephen Dale, General Manager APAC and Melissa Chue, Marketing Executive at Digimind.

Digimind is a sponsor at Marketing magazine’s 3rd annual PR Asia 2015 conference, happening 26-27 November in Singapore.

To book your seats for the conference contact Carlo Reston at carlor@marketing-interactive.com or +65 6423 0329, +65 9727 0291

For sponsorship opportunities, contact Johnathan Tiang at johnathant@marketing-interactive.com or +65 6423 0329