Marketers define real-time marketing as personalizing content when responding to consumers

Once considered a tactic purely for social media, real-time marketing (RTM) is now part of many marketing tactics—and its definition has shifted as a result.
In a February 2014 survey by Evergage, fielded by Researchscape International, around three-quarters of marketing professionals worldwide defined RTM as personalizing content in response to consumer interactions. This makes sense, given that more than eight in 10 marketers cited increasing customer engagement as a benefit to RTM, which is often done through personalized, targeted interactions.
Social media was still the top channel respondents used for RTM, cited by 48%. However, websites and email were close behind, at 45% and 39%, respectively. Evergage noted that the variety of channels marketers were using for RTM indicated just how popular the tactic had become.
More than one-third of marketers worldwide viewed RTM as extremely important to their organizations in 2014, according to Evergage. But an Adobe study produced by Edelman Berland and conducted by Research Now found different results that indicated US marketers did not view RTM as a top priority moving forward. Just 14% cited real time as important for the future—the second-lowest response.
However, Adobe’s study broke out personalization, social media and real time as three different tactics, while Evergage found that many RTM definitions included personalized and social tactics.