Make Marketing Timely.

So the World Cup is over. It was interesting last week. This week not so much. So why do I get an email today hawking some social media monitoring analysis of international interest in the event?

Because, in an age of real-time data capture, they presumably did what they always used to do. They waited to the end of their survey to finalise their findings rather than compile it on the fly and produce an interim report that might have sufficiently piqued my interest so that I would be hungry for the final results.

The time when people would be most engaged in that data would be during the tournament or, perhaps, in the run-up to the next major one. Now we're in the land of post-mortems and looking to the next event. Interest has moved on.

Targetting's not just about who and where. When is also key. The customers' schedule trumps your production schedule. Fish when the fish are hungry.