• by Tyler Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_tyler, December 11, 2013

One of the most common pieces of advice a real-time marketer hears is that they must always be ready. In other words, they need to be constantly aware of what the fresh content is and how people are reacting to it. As it turns out, they spend a big chunk of their time (28%) doing just that, but that's actually much less than they would like. 

Recently released data from Trapit says marketers would spend nearly half of their time on content marketing efforts if it weren't for other limitations. It's all about being personal and unique under today's definition of real-time marketing -- and not messing up like this -- which is tough to do with so many other brands attempting the exact same thing.

The marketing technology company surveyed 131 U.S. marketers in October 2013, and 54% believe automation is important for effective content curation. Similarly, 29% believe their company spends too much time curating content manually.

Maybe I'm just not in the know, but shouldn't that be 100%? Why so shy of automation?

Over half (57%) say finding the right kind of content to curate is difficult, and 53% think content curation is becoming less effective because of content saturation.

Going back to automating the content discovery/curation process: Wouldn't that help in both finding the right content and sifting through the saturated sea?

Real-time marketers need real-time content, and the best way to do that would seemingly be via automation. In a real-time bidding (RTB) environment, the same statement applies, except instead of content we'd be talking about data.

Is there data saturation in RTB? Is it difficult to find the right data sets in all that Big Data? Is automation important for effective Big Data wrangling? Yes, yes, and yes.

Programmatic trading and real-time marketing are not the same, but why not apply some the same programmatic trading principles to real-time marketing, namely automating the process of content discovery and curation?

"Shy" image from Shutterstock.