Social Media Marketing For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Organizing for Real-Time Marketing

Practicing real-time marketing successfully requires an interdisciplinary team coming together and partnering extremely closely. Just because you need to move really quickly doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do so in a very collaborative, inclusive fashion.

In large companies, real-time marketing teams typically include representatives from brand strategy, social media marketing, legal, media, public relations, and consumer relations functions. In small companies, the SMM team typically carries the responsibilities for real-time marketing and operates with predefined guidelines and processes.

The most challenging piece of real-time marketing is knowing which consumer trends to market against and which ones to avoid. There’s no doubt that some trends will be much more relevant to your brand and your specific consumers than others. However, discovering which those are only comes in time by testing and viewing the responses.

To help jump start your real-time marketing efforts, take the following steps:

Create a list of key topics. You cannot participate in every consumer trend or pop culture moment. But by creating a list of priority topics that are of interest to your consumers and matter to your brand, you’ll know which trends to prioritize over others ...