Remember when TV stations used to sign off with the Star-Spangled Banner? If you’re a millennial, you might not, but it used to happen. It’s one of those historical artifacts you don’t see anymore because all the major networks now broadcast around the clock. We no longer live in a world that waits; your television, your phone, and your internet access are always on, and we expect instant gratification.
It’s more important than ever that your marketing analytics are always on too. Whether your leads browse your site at 2:00 in the afternoon or in the wee hours of the morning, you need to know who they are and what they’re looking for so you can deliver it immediately. When you run an A/B split test, you can’t wait a week for the data to trickle in. Last year’s lead nurture strategies may not meet your current leads’ needs.
Enter real-time analytics.
Instant feedback on how prospects move from social media channels to your landing pages and throughout your site can tell you volumes about what motivates them. Let’s say, for instance, that a lead answers your latest Twitter poll and gets curious about the answers. To learn more, he clicks through a link in your previous tweet and bounces from page to page on your site. You’re able to trace this progress and turn it into meaningful information by combining it with other user data gathered in real time. You learn about when prospects visit you, what interests them, and how you can give them what they need quickly.
So much about customer interactions is time-sensitive. If you throw in-depth information at new leads, they’re going to feel lost. Send a more sales-ready prospect entry-level content, and they’re likely to tune it out as it isn’t relevant to them. On-demand analytics that tell you where individual leads are in their buying journey let you address what they need to know now – not what they might want in a week or really could have used last month.
A/B split testing is another area in which real-time analytics make a critical difference, and only marketing automation can supply the computational power it takes. With marketing automation technology, you see which message wins the head-to-head battle in real time and can push the winner out to your audience as soon as you feel it’s ready. That’s especially important because leads’ opinions can change over time, and the results of one week’s testing may not hold true next week.
In an instant-gratification world, you can’t afford to let your lead gen lag behind. Real-time interaction is a must for customers and for your analytics.
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