How do you Rock to the Beat of Real Time? Content!

censhare recently sponsored the Online Marketing Rockstars Festival, a packed event in Hamburg which brought over 40,000 marketers together across 2 huge halls and over a dozen speaking tracks – including a packed agenda of masterclass sessions.

Our contribution to the agenda was the 90-minute masterclass “Rocking to the Beat of Real Time” where my colleague Peter Makovitzky and I shared our experiences of approaching real time marketing with a packed room of digital marketers.

Today’s challenge for marketers is simply getting the right content to the right consumer across multiple touchpoints, but our session addressed the next challenge to be conquered, as content now needs to be relevant and real time, as ultra-convenience begins to trump the typical buying considerations such as price, and the opportunity to engage a consumer shrinks.

In common with the last wave of digital disruption which forever changed the look of our high streets when brittle technology and process complexity made “bricks and mortar” retailers vulnerable, the same will be true when we try to serve an audience whose expectations shift to ultra-convenience and real time.

I boil the approach to this challenge down to the 3 C’s – Customer, Content and Context, and we followed this structure for our masterclass.

In this article and video excerpt, I focus on content - it’s foundational to this digital experience and yet, it’s proper management is under rated.

We have invested heavily in understanding our audience and customers, yet most organizations have very little insight into their content and the strategic management of these assets, as they tend to sit buried in various content silos.

As you can see in the video, in the masterclass I use a rather simple example of selling a mug to a football fan in order to describe the importance of understanding what I consider to be the first C - your content, it’s semantic relationship to other content items and more specifically, mapping it to the attributes of your personas, their likes, and maybe more importantly dislikes, to deliver this relevancy.

Hopefully my reference to Chelsea football club and players from the late nineties for a young, hip, Hamburg audience was considered part of its charm rather than a case study of irrelevant content!

Peter Makovitzky, as our VP of Business Solutions and a long time customer experience expert, shared his experience of working with some great brands, such as Mercedes Benz, to cover the other two C’s – Customer and Context, including how to find those micro-moments which define real time marketing, and we’ll share more from this session in future articles.

Aside from this little snippet of our session, you can get also get backstage at OMR and experience a bit of the event for yourself by hearing from some of our team on what the whole event was like on this week’s Inside censhare.