How can you grow your customer base and increase your market share? One way is by optimizing content with real-time analytics. Real-time data can help make your initial analytics setup and implementation a breeze. If you’ve just launched a new product or feature, real-time data is especially useful for seeing if your users are adopting it from the start. When you use real-time analytics, you have the ability to tap into your customers’ preferences. This will allow you to provide a better experience overall. If your clients are satisfied then they will more than likely return and remain engaged, hence increasing your market share.

So what does optimizing your content mean? It’s about finding new ways to engage and empower your customers. Day 3 of the IBM Digital Experience 2015 is focused on Personalized Content. Here’s how you can create original content with real-time analytics:

- Tailor your content to what your analytics are showing about your customers’ interests and behaviors
- Be creative and adaptive -- find new ways to engage your customers with targeted offers and more self-service

What's the value-added? By optimizing your content, you are now able to identify actionable metrics. An actionable metric is one that is tied to specific and repeatable actions and leads to observed results. When you are able to observe and analyze your data right away, you will have the ability to take action within minutes of an event happening.

By analyzing real-time data, you can also eliminate potential future stress by identifying problems during an implementation. You will be able to watch what’s happening on your site or with a new product while simultaneously measuring the drive of traffic. Take the example of a news release writer. Media sites track which content is trending, increasing engagement and lending itself to gaining audience loyalty. If the end goal is for media outlets to pick up the story, real-time data will allow publishers to watch what's trending and deliver the right content at the right time.

Constantly keeping an eye on analytics can be time consuming; however it has the potential to save you considerable time in the future. Being able to track analytics immediately, may also give you peace of mind that things are running smoothly on the front end. By monitoring your audience and understanding their reactions, you can identify trends and learn from them. This will allow you to adapt your future content to match your customers’ behaviors.

If you are in-tune with your customers’ needs, real-time data has the potential to add a great deal of value to your business, while increasing customer loyalty. If you understand your customers, you can surprise them with relevant and tailored content and keep them coming back for more. An example of this might be sending a tweet instead of making a customer remain on hold for an endless amount of time, or providing a reminder service letting a reader know that new content is available. Act upon your customers' needs and desires. Solve your customers' problems. Be available and flexible and gain your readers' trust. Make quality customer interaction a priority. The end result? Your customers will return and your market value will increase.

Be ready! Act on data!

Learn more about IBM Digital Experience at ibm.co/DigitalEXP.