It’s Friday morning and you just scored floor tickets for your favorite band’s summer tour. You’ve seen social ads and emails about tickets going on sale, so you were ready.

Fast forward to Saturday and your email pings with a reminder to get your tickets now. Then you see ads for purchasing tickets to the tour twice in 30 minutes on Instagram. The obvious disconnect has your marketing brain’s synapses firing. You already bought tickets, why are they still advertising to you?

Now, imagine instead they had sent you an email reminder about buying a parking pass. Or placed social ads to pre-order tour merchandise. It would’ve grabbed your attention, right?

To wow customers and win their repeat business, you need to do more than connect. You have to engage them in the perfect way at every moment. Make their journey feel seamless. Real-time marketing is an opportunity for brands to deliver a personalized-for-the-moment user experience. But it’s also a challenge to keep up with the digital world’s lightspeed pace.

What is real-time marketing?

Real-time marketing is the act of delivering relevant and timely content to users. In an omnichannel world, this is not always as simple as it sounds.

A user might start their journey with a Facebook ad on their phone. They’ll check out your brand’s website on their tablet, then make a purchase on their PC. And they might call your support center if something goes wrong. All of this happens quickly, and you need to stitch together the details second by second.

There are two key aspects of real-time marketing:

• Keeping content relevant: Go beyond basic demographics and segmentation with messaging that’s laser-focused on a user’s interests and activity. McKinsey found companies that excel at personalization generate 40% more revenue than competitors.
• Timely delivery: It can take anywhere from one to 50 touchpoints to convert a prospect. 50! This means you need to give appropriate nudges at the right time to keep a user on track and engaged.

How do real-time data and marketing fit together?

To deliver relevant and timely content, you need information to work from. What is a user interested in? Where are they in the customer journey? How can you best provide value for them?

Real-time data is information you ingest and process without delay. Like, within milliseconds. “Older” data—even on the scale of minutes—is still valuable. But you can only use it reactively, rather than proactively.

In turn, real-time marketing needs real-time data to function properly. Plug old data into real-time marketing engines and you’ll get flawed insights. However, real-time marketing goes beyond data in two ways:

• Real-time insight: To use data, you need to turn it into actionable insights. Real-time analytics allow you to guide a customer’s journey as it’s happening, maximizing the chance of a positive outcome.
• Timing is everything: Real-time data is instantaneous, but real-time marketing doesn’t have to be. The goal is to connect with the customer at the ideal moment, whether that’s in 10 seconds or three days. Regardless, you need continuous streaming data to be able to make those decisions.

Take the concert ticket example. To prevent mistargeted ads and refine media buys, an entertainment company needs to know who bought tickets immediately. But they also don’t need to immediately upsell or re-market to attendees. Instead, they can rely on processing data in real-time to use it at the right time.

How a customer intelligence platform elevates real-time marketing

Many people thought customer data platforms (CDPs) would revolutionize marketing. Brands also thought relying on legacy data warehouses—originally built for static and batched data—would be able to keep up with real-time needs and streaming data. But the truth is, CDPs, data warehouses, and data lakes aren’t enough to get brands real-time marketing.

Unfortunately, CDPs aren’t a comprehensive solution. Getting all of your data in one place only matters if you can act on the information. And as many companies learned the hard way, unifying data into a single CDP is easier said than done—not to mention CDPs rarely have true real-time data and insights.

What companies need is customer intelligence. A platform shouldn’t just collect customer data. It should provide rapid and granular insights into why that data matters—with architecture to meet the marketing needs of today’s digital economy. To do this, a customer intelligence platform needs three key features:

• At the edge, real-time data ingestion: Bring all your company’s data under one roof in real-time as data is created. Seamlessly tying together CDPs, CRMs, and other data warehouses gives you access to a 360°, live view of customers.
• Real-time analysis: To turn data into actionable intelligence, you need a solution to accurately track customers’ journeys, rapidly optimize, and use AI to spot trends.
• Easy integration: Your customer intelligence platform should integrate with third-party marketing platforms and data warehouses so you can adjust campaigns and customer messaging on the fly and unify data.

Turn momentary wins into continuous success with Scuba

Most marketers work in competitive spaces. Increasing efficiency by a few percentage points can make or break a campaign. To stay on top, you need a customer intelligence platform with the entire customer journey at your fingertips. 

With a customer intelligence platform like Scuba, you have the power to:

• Ingest real-time data streams quickly and easily, without straining technical teams and resources
• Switch between birds-eye and granular views of customers’ journeys as they happen
• Configure real-time analytics KPI dashboards and customizable visualizations to manage your campaigns
• Customize alerts to spot pain points before they cost your company money and prevent churn
• Protect your users’ first-party data with data compliance upon ingest and throughout the entire data lifecycle, supported by industry-leading security measures

Ready to find out how Scuba can power your real-time marketing campaigns? Contact us for a demo today.