Carpe Diem: what Instant Marketing is and why it pays to use it (well!)

How many times have we burst out laughing in front of the irreverent posts on the Ceres Facebook page, or in front of the black humour of the Taffo creatives? If you don’t know what we’re talking about, we suggest you take a look at their pages, because these are just two examples of companies that make great use of what is known in the social world as Instant marketing!

Instant Marketing encompasses a set of actions designed and implemented in response to particular ‘hot’ and recent topics to allow companies to enter the flow of the most current conversations with their communication strategy.

This happens when the occurrence of a particular event that goes viral, especially on social networks (e.g. a sudden piece of news, an event that everyone is talking about, something about a famous person or even a scientific discovery, etc.), is associated with an advertising campaign that takes up the event in a joking, light-hearted, sarcastic or irreverent tone and relates it to a product of the company itself.

By promptly exploiting the chatter around the topic of the moment, you can interact with a greater number of users and expand your community. A company that wants to give its brand a voice with Instant Marketing must always be listening and ready to respond with creativity and irony to local, national and international daily events. This is not at all a simple task, which requires promptness and a strong creative connotation to come up with a brilliant idea straight away… The Instant Marketing mechanism is much easier said than done! But there are a few tricks …

Although it may seem like something unpredictable and unplannable, there are some cases in which it is possible to anticipate the creation of messages or content and then postpone their publication until after the event has taken place: in this case we talk about ‘Planned Instant Marketing‘.

A simple example? Coca Cola‘s tweet celebrating the birth of George of Cambridge, William and Kate’s firstborn.

Other times, however, in the case of unexpected news that goes viral, it is impossible to plan the posts to be published. This is what we call ‘spontaneous instant marketing‘, which requires more creativity and timing: here the difficulty lies in developing effective and, above all, engaging content in real time.

One example that has become famous for the speed with which it came out is Oreo‘s tweet posted on the occasion of the blackout that blacked out part of the Superdome stadium in New Orleans during the Super Bowl in 2013: the game was interrupted for more than half an hour, a lot of fans took to social media to occupy the time and came across a brilliant tweet: ‘Black out? No problem! You can dunk it in the dark!”

Another successful example is the one created in 2016 by the airline Norwegian Airlines, on the occasion of the divorce between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie: the company created an ironic and funny campaign inviting fans to buy a discounted one-way ticket to the City of Angels: “Brad is single: Los Angeles from £169”.

But timing is as important as the quality of the content: the distance between success and failure is very short and even an instant marketing strategy can be counterproductive. By using the wrong and ineffective media, especially social networks, and by using negative or offensive content, failure is dangerously close to the corner.

For example, in May 2013, Groupalia, one of the leading social shopping companies, shocked its followers with a very unfortunate tweet, posted following the earthquake in Emilia Romagna. Convinced that they were exploiting the news, the phrase “Afraid of the #earthquake? Let’s drop everything and run away to #SantoDomingo” appeared. The company realised the mistake and deleted the post, officially apologising for the bad slip, but it was too late… The indignation on the web was so great and within a few hours the hashtag #groupaliaFAIL had already gone viral.e failure is very short and even a marketing strategy based on Instant Marketing can be counterproductive.

That is why it is important to be very careful when choosing content to share in such a campaign!

The main advantages that this type of communication can bring to companies, if done well, are several:

• Differentiate your brand from the rest of your competitors, making it stand out by creating a strong identity
• Increase your visibility, both online and offline
• Increase engagement (reactions, comments and shares) on your social profilesa
• Improve your sales, thanks to a better conversion rate
• Enhance brand awareness, brand reputation and above all brand popularity

Of course, it is necessary to have a team ready to act with great timing, following the wave of the moment. If you are afraid of not succeeding, don’t worry: we are here to help you! Discover our services and ask us for a quote for the management of your pages!