Real-Time and The Rise of Nano-Marketing

The tracking and targeting of our online lives is no secret. Once we browse to a pair of shoes on a website, we are reminded about them in a retargeting campaign. Lesser known efforts happen behind the scenes to accumulate data and scan through it in realtime, delivering the perfect personalized campaign. Specificity and speed are converging to deliver nano-marketing.

If you are a business leader, you’ll want to stay versed in these latest approaches. If not, as a consumer, you’ll likely want to understand how brands are enabling their craft to you personally.

Brands seek specific customer interactions. If you sign up for a retailer’s newsletter, you might receive a preferences questionnaire so they can tailor everything to your specific wants or needs.

But speed also matters, as many of the largest marketing-driven industries like fashion, TV, movies, and music, depend on relevancy in the moment. Being current is currency itself. Only through real-time interaction can this be achieved.

Looking ahead, leaders of digital initiatives will expand their focus from today’s notion of personalized marketing to “nano-marketing” using tools to predict granular audience cohorts on the fly and prescribe individualized marketing experiences in real time. Brands can increase customer experience directly through context, by individual interaction, and instantaneously.

For example, when you walk into a furniture showroom where you also have an online account, the sales representative should know what you were searching for before you arrived, even if it was just a few hours ago. And they should have easy access to your Pinterest page if you’ve made that public. These are the types of experiences we can expect in the future with nano-marketing.

Behind nano-marketing, taking personalized marketing to the next level

The concept behind personalized marketing is hardly new. Brands have always strived to create special experiences for customers in order to entice them to return. With the creation of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and the proliferation of social media, this idea has become even more popular.

Marketing to customer segments of one merges existing and new disciplines to the trade. The low bar for what currently qualifies as “personalized marketing” will soon rise with the advent of tools that allow finer granularity, faster.

Looking ahead, we can expect three areas of marketing innovation:

The Autonomous Marketing Stack

Marketers have a plethora of available tools across infrastructure and analytics, including platforms like Salesforce.com, Marketo, Eloqua, Omniture, Google Analytics, and dozens of more specialized offerings. Truthfully the availability of special purpose tools has outstripped the individual’s ability to integrate them.

In the coming years, we’ll move far beyond just cobbling together the tools that help us be more efficient and cater to our customers; we’ll have a marketing tool stack that implements and executes campaigns on its own.

Imagine a system that watches social feeds for popular items, aggregates existing content to resurface it into the discussion, and kicks off a set of new content assets to carry the conversation forward. And this happens between Friday and Sunday with little human effort.

Virtual Reality Is The New Content

Today marketers often focus on generating a considerable amount of written content. Tomorrow they will put the pen down and focus on virtual experiences for customers that allow them to interact with content in ways not possible before. With attention spans getting shorter, and the firehose of new content bombarding customers, brands will need to focus on things that don’t just inform, but also entertain.

Whereas today an automobile company might customize regional billboards to fit with the landscape, soon they will offer tailored virtual reality experiences in a city and driving venue of your choice.

Where The Real-Time Meets The Road

Finally all of this will come together in the insatiable pursuit of instant gratification. Not only will consumers not be surprised by real-time results, they will come to demand it. To stay on top, marketers, and the tools they use, will need to absorb, process, and contextualize information more quickly to deliver unique interactive experiences. This is already happening in areas like ad tech and finance, but stay tuned as the latest in real-time technologies work their way across all industries.