Going Real-Time

Real-time content can be a powerful storytelling tool in your content marketing efforts. But as with any marketing effort, you can expend a ton of resources without getting a good return on investment if you don’t have a clear idea of why you’re producing the content in the first place.

What’s Your Goal?

There is nothing wrong with trying to create and use real-time content as a marketing test. One of the huge benefits of online marketing is the significantly reduced cost compared to print or broadcast marketing. But simply “going live” is unlikely to yield meaningful results, particularly if your production quality is poor.

Common real-time goals include:

• Control the narrative of breaking news: Don’t rely on other outlets to tell your story.
• New audience engagement: Younger audiences are highly visual and reliant on mobile communications. Streaming a game could build engagement with a younger demographic.
• Call-to-action via scarcity marketing: The success of shopping channels is predicated upon scarcity marketing, and the point of having a real-time host is to build urgency around a call-to-action. Sneaker brands and even high-fashion brands like Burberry “drop” limited edition products to take advantage of scarcity marketing. Similarly, brands can use the same strategy in their real-time efforts for activities like fundraising, sales, etc.

Most organizations will gravitate towards attracting a new (and younger) audience. But audience building can be a futile exercise without a longer term understanding of what you intend to do with that demographic.

Building an audience of college students, for example, is useless if you don’t convince a percentage of them to participate in alumni activities (from social activities to volunteerism to donations). Make sure your goal extends beyond increasing followers.

Who’s Your Audience?

Identifying your audience is crucial, yet it remains a vexing exercise for many organizations. On the one hand, unsophisticated organizations tend to think of their audience as monolithic. On the other hand, digital marketing opens up significant potential for audience segmentation, which can lead to analysis paralysis.

Real-time content is well understood for things like sports and election results – in part because the audiences are seemingly easy to identify (namely, fans). But the 80,000 people that attend a NFL game aren’t all fans. And even the fans have varying levels of fanaticism. Sports teams have experimented for years with things like the “Kiss Cam” and fan photos as real-time engagement tools that target different audiences.

You can consider your audience categorically (e.g. student, alumni, parent), or you can consider where they fit by engagement (aka: the marketing funnel which ranges from stranger to customer to advocate). Of course, these two approaches aren’t mutually exclusive, and it’s a good exercise to create an audience grid to identify areas of focus – and where real-time marketing might fit best.

Does Real-Time Have to Really Be Real-Time?

The strictest definition of real-time storytelling might conjure visions of a live broadcast. We subscribe to a broader definition that includes using elements of real-time capture as a storytelling device. This definition includes content that might be consumed by your intended audience at a later date. Instagram Stories are a good example of real-time capture that has a more authentic, unfiltered feel than a fully produced marketing video.

In the same way that photos and video can enhance a written story, real-time coverage represents another option for contemporary storytelling that has been dramatically enhanced with technological advances from gear (e.g. WiFi transmitters on cameras) to platforms (e.g. TikTok Live, Instagram Stories, etc). Telling a single story from multiple angles allows marketers to broaden the potential audience and create different points of engagement with a modicum of extra effort.

Choosing a Deployment Platform

Although there are numerous ways to deploy real-time content, choosing an appropriate platform comes down to identifying your audience:

1. Who is the audience you have?
2. Who is the audience you want?
3. Where do they congregate?

If you want to reach senior citizens, then buying daytime TV ads is a pretty good bet. But if you want to reach college students, then leaning into mobile, visually-oriented social media apps (e.g. TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat) is the way to go.

Getting to know the nuance of each platform before deploying a larger campaign is crucial. It’s easy enough to learn about different features (e.g. Instagram Stories’ “Poll” option), but it’s much harder to understand how to use them in a natural, authentic way that connects with a native audience. For example, older, more traditional visual storytellers might balk at shooting vertical video, but it is imperative to use when dealing with mobile devices.

Examples:

Mississippi State University Athletics (Hail State)

The NFL Draft is a time when many student athletes are officially introduced to football fans around the country. When it was time for Mississippi State University (Hail State) to take the stage, the school’s former Director of Photography, Kevin Snyder, and Director of Digital and Social Media, David Czarlinsky, collaborated on coverage with a real-time approach.

As photographers documented the touching moments of Emmanuel Forbes Jr. accepting his new role on the Washington Commanders, the marketing and creative teams at Hail State were receiving images live and in the moment. With an FTP workflow, sending images straight from the camera into their PhotoShelter Library, they were able to share photos of the big news with fans and followers as soon as they happened.

Watch the webinar with Kevin and David from Hail State to see it in action.

Content Marketing World

Combining event marketing and real-time content distribution can leave a lasting impact and a memorable experience for attendees.

Photographer Michelle Loufman was tasked with taking headshots at Content Marketing World (CMW) with one catch: As a trade show giveaway, attendees would access their headshots in real time. No tethering. No editing.

As attendees walked around the conference, they were offered photos free of charge. The best part? They were sent straight to their phones and inboxes so they could leave the event with a brand new headshot.

Real-time photo delivery, especially during an event, is a way to stand out and engage with attendees and other audiences – even before the event comes to an end.

Learn about Michelle’s gear set-up at CMW and the simple steps she took to enable a real-time photography workflow.

Conclusion

Maintaining real-time storytelling can often feel like a frenetic exercise. In truth, many of an organization’s real-time storytelling opportunities are known and can be planned for well in advance. Developing a playbook for real-time content is essential, but the payoff for publishing relevant, brand-enhancing stories is enormous. Keep it real(-time).

For more real-time tips, download our guide Real-Time Workflow 2.0: The Guide to Faster Visual Storytelling.