Real-time marketing is
marketing
Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services; potentially including selection of a target audience; selection of certain attributes or themes to emph ...
performed "
on-the-fly" to determine an appropriate or optimal approach to a particular
customer at a particular time and place. It is a form of
market research
Market research is an organized effort to gather information about target markets and customers: know about them, starting with who they are. It is an important component of business strategy and a major factor in maintaining competitiveness. Mar ...
inbound marketing that seeks the most appropriate offer for a given customer sales opportunity, reversing the traditional
outbound marketing (or
interruption marketing Interruption marketing or outbound marketing is promoting a product through continued advertising, promotions, public relations and sales. It's the opposite of permission marketing. It is considered to be an annoying version of the traditional way o ...
) which aims to acquire appropriate customers for a given 'pre-defined' offer. The dynamic 'just-in-time' decision making behind a real-time offer aims to exploit a given customer interaction defined by website
clicks or verbal
contact centre conversation.
History
Real-time marketing techniques developed during the mid-1990s following the initial deployment of
customer relationship management
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a process in which a business or other organization administers its interactions with customers, typically using data analysis to study big data, large amounts of information.
CRM systems data collectio ...
(CRM) solutions in major
retail banking,
investment banking and
telecommunications
Telecommunication is the transmission of information by various types of technologies over wire, radio, optical, or other electromagnetic systems. It has its origin in the desire of humans for communication over a distance greater than that fe ...
companies. The intrinsic and prevailing 'heavyweight' nature of the key CRM vendors at this time, who were generally focused on major back and front office system integration projects, provided an opportunity for niche players within the
campaign management application arena.
Solution delivery
The implementation of real-time marketing solutions through the late 1990s would typically involve a 10- to 14-week delivery project with 1-2
FTE expert consultants and often would follow an earlier outbound marketing solution implementation. This relatively lightweight delivery model had obvious attractions within the vendor sales cycle and customer procurement context but was ultimately to prove a disincentive for major
systems integration
System integration is defined in engineering as the process of bringing together the component sub-systems into one system (an aggregation of subsystems cooperating so that the system is able to deliver the overarching functionality) and ensuring ...
services providers to partner with real-time marketing vendors.
Technical overview
Real-time marketing solution implementation classically involves the server-side installation of a multithreaded core decisioning application server / interaction transactional-biased
schema
The word schema comes from the Greek word ('), which means ''shape'', or more generally, ''plan''. The plural is ('). In English, both ''schemas'' and ''schemata'' are used as plural forms.
Schema may refer to:
Science and technology
* SCHEMA ...
and supporting client components such as a 'fat-client' desktop campaign studio / rules editor, browser-based marketing user reporting interface and enterprise application
API
An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...
s such as
web services /
Java
Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...
components. Vendors typically will also provide legacy interfaces for COM,
sockets and
HTTP
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide We ...
integration.
Vendor solution approaches to real-time learning naturally vary but commonly, the underlying models utilize a naive
Bayesian probability
Bayesian probability is an interpretation of the concept of probability, in which, instead of frequency or propensity of some phenomenon, probability is interpreted as reasonable expectation representing a state of knowledge or as quantification ...
classifier, recognizing that despite their apparently oversimplified assumptions, these classifiers have worked well in many complex real-world situations. To help gain acceptance with in-house specialist
data mining stakeholders, the real-time solutions also support external model scores and execution within offer decision making.
The dotcom 'bust' of 2000 inhibited the further development and implementation of item-based
collaborative filtering
Collaborative filtering (CF) is a technique used by recommender systems.Francesco Ricci and Lior Rokach and Bracha ShapiraIntroduction to Recommender Systems Handbook Recommender Systems Handbook, Springer, 2011, pp. 1-35 Collaborative filtering ...
techniques which, having been incorporated within real-time marketing solutions through the 1990s, should have been immediately attractive to online retailers managing hundreds of thousands (or millions) of products as opposed to a retail bank with a hundred propositions across savings,
credit card
A credit card is a payment card issued to users (cardholders) to enable the cardholder to pay a merchant for goods and services based on the cardholder's accrued debt (i.e., promise to the card issuer to pay them for the amounts plus the o ...
and
mortgage
A mortgage loan or simply mortgage (), in civil law jurisdicions known also as a hypothec loan, is a loan used either by purchasers of real property to raise funds to buy real estate, or by existing property owners to raise funds for any ...
product lines.
Marketing vision
Over time, it became apparent to solution vendors and maturing customers alike, that 'traditional' outbound and emergent inbound marketing initiatives should be consolidated within a coherent and coordinated enterprise marketing strategy. To this end, a class of marketing application known as marketing resource management (MRM) which 'sits above' real-time marketing, began to emerge during the early 21st Century, albeit in a fairly bespoke and implementation-specific guise. The essence of this abstraction layer is that the MRM application orchestrates strategy, stakeholder sign-off, budgeting, program planning, campaign execution and effectiveness reporting across inbound real-time and outbound marketing disciplines.
Unrealized promise
The term "real-time marketing" has the potential weakness of self-limiting the underlying decisioning server capability to cross/up-selling despite the observation that this particular function is generally the most compelling aspect of the application class. Vendors therefore found themselves re-branding real-time marketing products to suggest a more holistic appreciation of enterprise interaction decision management.
In some respects, these early real-time marketing customer implementations were ahead of their time despite acknowledged revenue realization within the
early adopter
An early adopter or lighthouse customer is an early customer of a given company, product, or technology. The term originates from Everett M. Rogers' ''Diffusion of Innovations'' (1962).
History
Typically, early adopters are customers who, in addit ...
s.
Hosted real-time marketing solutions are an obvious and increasingly prevalent means of provisioning organizational demand for this critical enterprise capability. A remaining challenge for such solution vendors is to fully convince enterprise clients that the customer data profile (often comprising up to 1000 source or derived attributes) involved in the decision making and targeting processes is fully secure. Packaged 'private' cloud solutions are already appearing alongside 'cloud sourcing' management consultancies.
Gartner's predictions for the Gartner Top 10 Technologies for 2011
suggest that whatever the nomenclature, real-time marketing will continue to evolve, crucially to embrace mobile platforms underpinned by an awareness of customer context, location and social networking (
collective intelligence) implications.
See also
*
Haggling
In the social sciences, bargaining or haggling is a type of negotiation in which the buyer and seller of a good or service debate the price or nature of a transaction. If the bargaining produces agreement on terms, the transaction takes p ...
*
Predictive analytics
Predictive analytics encompasses a variety of statistical techniques from data mining, predictive modeling, and machine learning that analyze current and historical facts to make predictions about future or otherwise unknown events.
In busine ...
*
Marketing automation
Marketing automation refers to software platforms and technologies designed for marketing departments and organizations to more effectively market on multiple channels online (such as email, social media, websites, etc.) and automate repetitiv ...
*
Online marketing platform
*
Public relations
Public relations (PR) is the practice of managing and disseminating information from an individual or an organization (such as a business, government agency, or a nonprofit organization) to the public in order to influence their perception. ...
*
Viral marketing
Viral marketing is a business strategy that uses existing social networks to promote a product mainly on various social media platforms. Its name refers to how consumers spread information about a product with other people, much in the same way tha ...
*
Mobile marketing
Mobile marketing is a multi-channel online marketing technique focused at reaching a specific audience on their smartphones, feature phones, tablets, or any other related devices through websites, e-mail, SMS and MMS, social media, or mobile a ...
References
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Marketing techniques