How Real-time Data is Changing Marketing Strategy?

While the availability of data is ubiquitous, its accuracy is often fleeting and temporary. Having access to more information doesn’t guarantee success. It just provides marketers with the right field of action and tools to help accelerate and succeed. The inability to read qualitative information and the lack of reliable insights pose significant challenges for marketers today.

Qualitative customer data is a rich asset in today’s digital economy to drive successful campaigns. A Harvard Business Review study shows that companies with the highest customer loyalty have significantly more frequent access to real-time, up-to-date consumer behavior data. The strength of customer loyalty depends largely on the quality of the experiences a company offers them. These experiences are becoming more valuable through personalization which is  based on data captured in real time.

What makes some companies more successful than others?

Effective marketing strategies are an initiative that, through the use of valuable data, allows companies to optimize their communications and maximize their ROI. Real-time data refers to anything that creates useful insights about customers that marketers can immediately process and implement. And this, in turn, leads to a faster and more efficient marketing process, providing additional returns. Real-time data analysis is the process of preparing and measuring the quality of data as soon as it enters the system. Capturing data from potential customers is much easier today, given the multitude of channels:

• mobile apps,
• websites,
• social media,
• email.

Real-time Data Marketing refers to automatic responses to customer behavior. When a customer visits the website, uses an app, searches for the product it ultimately results in a personalized and contextually relevant offer at a given time that brings customer attention and interest, purchase and building a positive experience.

Real-time Data – Acting here and now

Marketing using real-time data is a welcome tool and one of the most effective ways to gain customer loyalty. Leaders should focus on developing real-time analytics capabilities because as consumer behavior is becoming less predictable. To remain competitive, companies must instantly identify ways to acquire and retain customers. The speed of data-driven action enhances this competitiveness in a volatile marketplace.

The big picture of the customer base only emerges through real-time data analysis. With modern data management platforms, marketers can collect, source and analyze data from multiple sources simultaneously. Due to the dynamic nature of data, it can be used in more effective ways than when using only statistical data. This creates offers that are useful to customers and, most importantly, current. It is important to act in a systematic, end-to-end manner. Personalizing a website or redirecting a customer based on an interaction that took place a week or even a day ago is not real-time marketing.

There is a growing expectation among consumers for brands to deliver messages to them in a personalized way, but only if they consent to the use of their personal data. This allows brands to offer the best possible experience. Digital transformation and increasing competition have made building customer engagement a very challenging task. Brands are changing their approach to implementing loyalty programs and are showing special interest towards solutions based on new technologies.

Summary

Real-time data marketing affords a certain level of automation. For best results, it is important to control the entire customer lifecycle in real time, but at the same time omnichannel. A systematic approach to collecting cross-channel data on customer actions and responding immediately through preferred touch points is key. By observing and processing the information, companies are able to assess the individual needs of shoppers, suggesting the right products or services, providing them with relevant content. In this way, procedures based on real-time data analysis will make customer interactions smoother and more efficient across channels.