We live in a world of “now, now, now” – call-ahead Starbucks orders, Amazon holiday shopping, instantaneous communication on social media – and there’s no slowing down on the startling exponential speed of disseminating messages. Immediacy is the one growing marketing trend businesses need to get ahead of, and fast.
Whether it’s to tell the world of a new product launch or to share a 70 percent off the entire store sale consumers can’t miss, asking for immediate action requires an immediate response. You may remember in 2013 Oreo’s famous Super Bowl XLVII ad win following a blackout. The brilliance in the sandwich cookie’s rapid response on Twitter gained 15,000 retweets and more than 20,000 likes on Facebook over time.
How can marketers adopt a culture of immediacy in their marketing mix? Learning and mastering the equation, “Immediate Ask + Immediate Response = Immediate Success,” is the Holy Grail of marketing sorts. Below are three more tips that can help support your business’ claim to the immediacy throne:
Closely monitor your business’ industry news and trends.
Thanks to social media, channels offer news feeds (AKA trending topics) on their respective dashboards. Find a topic on which your company could serve as a subject matter expert and execute. This is especially helpful for B2C businesses. In today’s fast-paced society, you need to keep a pulse on what your customers are saying and how to best deliver on the consumer experience. As Search Engine Watch says, “act and react”. Monitor your own social media channels with total engagement and see what’s resonating.
Enlist a team to track your email and social media marketing metrics.
As marketing campaign costs continue to increase, it’s important to measure campaign performance and make necessary tweaks to ensure success as quickly as possible. Enlisting a team or individual to weekly or monthly track your campaign is an effective way of showing your spend’s return on investment. Recommended resources include Google Analytics for digital marketing or social media management programs Sprout Social or Hootsuite.
Invest in a strong key message that audiences will remember.
Be it a jingle or tagline, invest in strong messaging that audiences will remember, recite and keep in mind when they’re tasked with a call-to-action. Maybe it will send someone back to that “one time when” or strike a chord in making a change. As long as that message is consistent with your overall brand and is evergreen, you can use that message in a variety of marketing ways time and time again.
Take “The Most Interesting Man in the World” ad campaign by Dos Equis, which invited us all to question what makes someone interesting (is it the beer we drink?). Though the spokesman has changed, we’ll always remember Dos Equis as the creator of interesting men and internet meme “I don’t always (A), but when I do, I (B).”
It may take weeks, months or years to grasp the immediacy equation, “Immediate Ask + Immediate Response = Immediate Success”. But by adopting a culture of living and marketing in the now, you can push your marketing to newer heights your business never thought possible – yes, this includes deploying the Snapchat dog filter.
