This sponsored post is produced by Livefyre.
Oreo became the stuff of marketing folklore last year when it famously seized the moment during a massive power outage at the Super Bowl with a simple, now-iconic Tweet. Brands have been buzzing about real-time marketing ever since, and nearly two years later, everyone from Airbnb to Denny’s employs a team of round-the-clock social strategists ready to jump at any opportunity to join trending conversations.
Witty Tweets aside, real-time marketing has evolved far beyond just a bunch of brand marketers pining for an “Oreo Moment” in the spotlight. In this age of instant gratification, audiences demand an almost constant flow of interesting, relevant content from the brands and publishers they care about. Brands must interact with their audiences in real time, capturing and sharing action as it unfolds.
Real-time has become synonymous with relevancy, and today’s consumers expect ongoing brand experiences — not cyclical marketing campaigns. So, unsurprisingly, the top three challenges facing content marketers right now are producing engaging content, producing enough content and producing that content within budget. And all three are impossible to solve with traditional content alone.
The good news? Chances are, you’re already sitting on a gold mine of exactly the kind of content that can help you keep up with consumer demand: rapid content. Rapid content is the photos, videos, comments, Tweets, reviews, live blogs and all the other real-time communication that brands and audiences upload every day. By incorporating rapid content into your content marketing strategy, you gain instant access to an endless stockpile of engaging, relevant marketing assets that adds value to your customer engagement strategy.
The only thing those assets need in order to thrive is a distribution channel. If a beautiful Instagram image only lives on a campaign microsite or an outstanding customer review only lives on a single product page, neither is getting the visibility it warrants. But if you also incorporate that same original content into a homepage banner or an ad unit, for example, then that content transforms into instant, ready-made and highly exposable marketing assets. More than 60 percent of marketers using real-time content see benefits in marketing effectiveness, customer experience and customer retention, according to research from Adobe.
The same goes for brand-created content. Brand managers are constantly producing tons of exclusive original information, from live behind-the-scenes videos to how-to blog posts. And just like fan-created content, it doesn’t have to live and die on just one medium.
Churning out enough compelling content to delight every customer who interacts with your brand is hard… And doing it in-the-moment is even harder, especially with just traditional content. But if you change the way you think about content marketing to truly maximize all of the tools, assets and distribution channels at your disposal, it’s far from impossible.
Jordan Kretchmer is Founder and CEO of Livefyre.
Sponsored posts are content that has been produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. The content of news stories produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com.