As marketing data becomes more expansive and technology continues to fold in AI capabilities, real-time marketing analytics can offer a serious boost to businesses. With data analytics becoming more widely used, customers expect real-time, personalized outreach and quick responses across all their company interactions.
There’s still a gap between dreams and reality, though: A report from SAS and Harvard Business Review Analytic Services found that more than 80% of respondents surveyed want to use analytics to generate real-time actions from customer data, but only 22% say they are actually effective in using the analytics and data they have.
Here, I’ll discuss the challenges and benefits of real-time analytics, how to get started, and how you might use your data to connect with customers, anticipate their needs, and ultimately close more sales.
What is Real-Time Analytics in Marketing?
Real-time analytics is the practice of capturing, processing, and evaluating data coming in from across various channels and inputs, in order to better make decisions. When real-time analytics is applied to marketing, it’s a powerful way to respond quickly to your users and customers, personalize offers, and make tweaks to campaigns and tactics. With the proliferation of channels available to marketers today, there is a lot of potential for honing real-time analytics to meet your customers where they are.
When real-time marketing analytics are working well, you might use up-to-the-minute customer activity information to change ad copy, replace an ad, move budget to a better-performing tactic, or surface tailored recommendations to online shoppers. Some of the more cutting-edge uses of real-time marketing analytics involve maximizing existing customer value as well as converting new customers: You might, for example, anticipate approaching subscription cancellation periods or track customer usage, then tailor offers accordingly to retain that user. Beyond personalization, you can use real-time data to experiment with individualized marketing, a hyper-targeted method that speaks to a customer in a way that’s meant just for them.
Benefits of Real Time Analytics for Performance Marketers
For performance marketers, real-time marketing analytics are an important part of a bigger data-driven strategy to increase results, like more traffic, clicks, or leads. Data analytics can help marketers make better optimization decisions, removing guesswork or hunches from the process.
While just about every business these days wants to be operating in real time, there are a few key pillars that must be put in place first. Once they are, you can swiftly take action to move customers more quickly to conversion.
Comprehensive Data Collection
Data is at the heart of analytics, so make sure that you’re capturing clean, accurate data from all the sources available, including your website, ad information, customer interactions and behavior, voice of the customer (VoC) data, and social media channels.
Instant Data Processing
There’s a good amount of “near real-time” technology available for modern marketers. But real-time marketing analytics requires data to be processed as soon as it’s collected so that this raw information becomes actionable. With competition high, quick action can increase revenue and improve user experiences.
Live Dashboards and Alerts
Real-time marketing analytics platforms should include up-to-the-minute dashboards so you can monitor trends as they’re happening. This helps you to spot any unexpected spikes or dips and adjust as needed.
Actionable Insights
The data you collect can tell all kinds of stories if you’re able to quickly visualize and act on it. Actionable insights lead to better decision-making, particularly for performance marketers who are optimizing in real time.
Real-Time Marketing Gaps
Customer data platforms (CDPs) and other technologies have evolved quickly, but many businesses are still encountering challenges in creating a smooth real-time marketing analytics process. A few of areas of difficulty in particular plague marketers:
Integration Issues
Technology has evolved fast, leaving most companies struggling with legacy data and siloes. It could be the result of acquisitions, mergers, shifting platforms over the years, or improperly stored data, but whatever the case, it’s common to face challenges when trying to get disparate data sources to work together, thus making it harder to get the full picture of customer behavior. If you can’t correlate data points to get a comprehensive look , it’s much harder to optimize in the moment.
Resource Shortages
Smaller companies might run into a lack of resources — technical, financial, or both — when launching real-time marketing analytics programs, since they require specialized tools and expertise (either in-house or not) to perform this complex data processing. Without sufficient resources, it’ll be harder to take full advantage of the available data and use it effectively.
Lack of Education
There’s so much potential for marketers using real-time analytics, but there’s a lot to learn, too. Analyzing and interpreting large datasets is still a fairly new skillset outside of the data science field, and without some training in and understanding of data analysis, making optimizations and decisions is much harder — as is the culture and mindset change required.
Regulatory Concerns
When you’re collecting data, you have to keep abreast of regulations like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), and others, depending on your industry. It’s too easy to end up in the news for a data breach or other violations relating to ad verification, risking fines and long-term impacts on trust and brand reputation.
Enhance your ad review process for faster approval and better campaign delivery
Misaligned Reporting
Creating reports in the ways you traditionally have likely won’t work as you adopt real-time marketing analytics. Make sure you’re able to perform in-depth analysis and that your metrics and reports capture customer behavior — performance marketers in particular will want to get this right to avoid wasting resources.
5 Considerations When Bridging Real-Time Marketing Gaps
Real-time marketing analytics is still maturing, as are the related tech platforms. Take some time when you’re getting started to make sure you’re building a strong foundation for a platform that’s useful, user-oriented, and built for the long term. Once you’ve chosen or built a tool for capturing and displaying real-time customer data, try these tips for success:
1. Set the Stage for Culture Change
It’s easy to talk about building a data-driven marketing culture, but much harder to actually create it. Start with communications about what being data-driven means, and why real-time analytics will be crucial for the business’ success. From there, build and share a roadmap of changes, outlining which metrics will be incorporated to measure results. Create a library with your team of common customer actions and responses, and figure out what kind of training your teams might need to succeed with real-time data analytics.
2. Define the Data Strategy
An effective data strategy will instruct your team on transforming available data into insights. This means connecting disparate systems to communicate in real time and making sure all data is high quality, whether it’s historical or new. A solid data strategy will also include the setup of triggers and rules for various actions to automate customer interactions. Your IT team or consultant can help ensure the system scales and performs consistently.
3. Break Down Silos
Even small companies have organizational and data silos. A two-person customer team might maintain their own repository, while the campaign team has their own stash of rich, useful data. Success with real-time analytics — and exceptional customer experiences — depend on all data being available and accessible by everyone who interacts with customers.
4. Make Real-Time Data a Team Activity
With a data strategy in place and a solid understanding of the “why” behind real-time analytics, you can point teams toward a central data repository and make sure it’s easy for everyone to access. Continue training teams on data-analysis techniques with a laser focus on what customers are doing and saying. Performance marketers can use this opportunity to zero in on user intent, understanding when to reconnect with customers or change course in a campaign.
5. Continue to Refine
Like many things in marketing, real-time analytics will improve with testing, learning, and refining tactics over time. Make sure to create reporting frameworks that display the shared KPIs of your team so everyone can view and discuss results. The day-to-day work of real-time analytics will also help you understand the ideal timing of customer interactions.
Benefits of Real-Time analytics in Performance Marketing
As the concept of full-funnel marketing loses value, real-time analytics comes into play in performance marketing as a way to spend every marketing dollar wisely and overcome audience fatigue. Real-time data allows you to examine how customers are interacting with your brand, rather than making assumptions based on older or incomplete data. The SAS/Harvard Business Review survey referenced above found that 60% of business leaders said their companies have seen marked increases in customer retention thanks to real-time data analytics. Other benefits include:
Improved Customer Experiences
Arguably the most important benefit, better customer experiences can help increase revenue along with brand reputation and trust. Customers who get immediate responses, or are correctly targeted with offers, feel seen in a busy digital landscape.
Increased Efficiencies
When you’re saying the right thing to the right person, you’re not wasting time or resources casting a wide digital net. Your customer gets the information they need, while your time has been well-spent in developing the customer response library based on data. Real-time analytics also mean you can make a campaign adjustment immediately, rather than seeing month-old data and only then realizing the targeting or copy wasn’t hitting its mark.
Easier Innovation
With real-time analytics in play, you can try something new for a day or a week and see how it’s performing. If it’s going well, add a variable or make a tweak to test some assumptions. You won’t have to wait weeks or months to understand if it was successful — or not — and can make the appropriate changes immediately.
How to Use Real-Time Analytics in Marketing to Convert
Once you’ve got your real-time analytics platform up and running, start thinking about how you can move your customers from intent to purchase. Consider these areas to put that real-time data to work:
1. Website Activity Tracking
Your company’s website is still a hub for user activity, despite the many other channels available. Real-time web analytics can provide fascinating insight into where users are staying on site, where they’re leaving, and which buttons they’re clicking on. With real-time analytics in play, a longer visit on a certain product page might prompt a personalized ad or live chat popup.
2. Optimized Campaigns
Real-time data eliminates the lag between launching a new or revamped campaign and waiting for results. This can save lots of time and budget, allowing you to adjust email subject lines, ad buys, and other variables if a campaign element doesn’t seem to be working. Intent data is useful here, letting you see who’s actually looking for a product or solution like yours and tailoring content specifically to them.
3. Lead Scoring and Nurturing
Real-time analytics help keep leads fresh and nurtured quickly, rather than letting follow-ups linger for weeks or longer. Keep an eye on the data to see where qualified leads are coming from and consider optimizing or testing on the fly to encourage more leads. Use the associated demographic information from a lead to understand if your targeting is working or not. You can also prep sales teams quickly for follow-up if you automate triggers for certain leads.
4. Social Media Marketing
Real-time marketing analytics can make social media monitoring a lot less daunting. These channels move quickly, with trends emerging and disappearing daily or hourly. Real-time data lets you take advantage of a trend or respond immediately to a comment or question, then choose how to follow up or retarget a user.
5. ABM
The combination of account-based marketing (ABM) and real-time analytics makes it easy to track high-value prospects and their activities. Take action immediately if you see an email open, for example, with a follow-up email or other tactic.
Key Takeaways
Implementing real-time marketing analytics as part of a broader data-driven culture doesn’t happen overnight, but companies can reap great rewards if they put in the time and effort. Real-time analytics let modern companies break through the noise and eliminate uncertainty from their marketing campaigns and tactics and, with time and attention, will lead to better customer experiences and more conversions.
Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
What is an example of real-time marketing analytics?
As one example, real-time marketing analytics might be used to identify customers nearing the end of their subscription period. A marketing team could create a specific offer for those customers based on their recent activities, such as a coupon, free period, or special gift. Then, the customer receives that offer before they’ve considered canceling the subscription and can extend it further.
What is real-time marketing analytics primarily used for?
Real-time marketing analytics help businesses make in-the-moment, data-driven decisions to better serve customers. They can use real-time analytics tools to adjust for market trends and customer behavior, generally leading to improved user experiences and revenue.
What are the four types of data analytics in marketing?
The four types of data analytics are:
- Descriptive: Focuses on past data summaries.
- Diagnostic: Aims to understand the root causes of actions.
- Predictive: Uses historical data to forecast future outcomes.
- Prescriptive: Recommends specific activities for better future outcomes.
