What is Always-on Marketing – The Benefits and Why It Matters?
Always-on marketing is a consistent, non-campaign, and strategic optimization approach to creating remarkable and unforgettable brand experiences at scale.
So, How Does It Work Actually?
Always-on marketing works in two ways. One way is that always-on marketing is ‘pulled’ from the consumer. It means you may push a digital banner ad or an email out to the largest audience hoping that an audience would make a purchase from you. Then you keep repeating this to attract more responses. Alternatively, you can enable one time discounted flight to be revealed at 8 pm on the weekend based on the recent website visit, search, and social activities.
Another method of always-on marketing is anticipatory. It focuses on consumer behavior, the similarities, and the nuances. It provides everything that your targeted consumers want in advance and allows them to engage with your services or products.
Always-on marketing aims at performing continuous online persuasion and maintaining visibility throughout the year. The purpose is to reach and persuade your prospects when they show their intention of buying by researching services and products using social media, search engines, comparison sites, reviews, and trusted influencers.
Getting Started with Always-On Marketing (AOM):
Some marketers optimize hundreds of brand experiences proactively. It may seem like a daunting task, but this does not happen overnight. They get there gradually by scaling what works and testing new processes. You can begin by recognizing one or two buying journey experiences that matter the most to your brand. To begin with, you can consider providing a personalized content experience or creating unique moments of the purchase process where your brand is best placed to amaze them. When your optimization process creates the desired outcome, your team can have the opportunity to come up with ways that can create a better brand experience elsewhere.
Key Techniques for Supporting Always-on
If you are buying into the concept, you must also consider these to make it happen:
Planning the AOM – You will have to dedicate time to this. However, it might not be easy if all the budget and time are devoted to campaign activities. Make sure that you use a comprehensive digital marketing planning framework for smooth operations.
Investing in AOM – You will need to invest in sales or marketing automation technology (check out Sales Automation Vs. Marketing Automation – Understanding the Differences), media for attracting and re-targeting audiences, expert agency skills like organic search, and others to make this happen.
Optimizing always-on marketing – Many marketers are planning or already adopting these inbound marketing techniques. Therefore, you will have to optimize the methods to compete better and fair.
Key Benefits of Always-on Marketing
1. It helps in brand building and long-term sales
Most customers prefer buying new products from familiar brands. This established trust remains a powerful commodity even when people are searching for novelty. You cannot make a brand with seasonal or short-term strategies. You will have to put steady investments of money and time into building your business’s image and reputation. You can accomplish this only with an always-on marketing vision.
2. It amplifies your outcome
In event-based marketing, the activity is ramped-up for a particular period, which soon drops away after seeing a flurry of sales. However, always-on marketing increases your base level of awareness among your target market continually. So, you get larger spikes than before when the time for another seasonal push comes.
3. It gives opportunities for meaningful measurements
A major benefit of AOM is that you get more marketing data. Getting deep into your marketing insights is a fantastic way to perk up your campaign performance. You can quickly increase credible benchmarks for your success when you continue performing your marketing activities throughout the year. This window into your performance will be much more valuable than the snapshot given by event-based marketing strategies, which seasonal-dependent factors can twist.
4. It helps in building the customer database
Always-on marketing will not get rid of the seasonal troughs and peaks automatically. However, you may still cultivate them as contacts even when people aren’t buying as much as they used to from you. Many businesses overlook the fact that apart from generating sales, building and maintaining a robust contact database is another aspect of digital marketing. To accomplish that, focus on creating quality content that people are happy to exchange in place of their contact details. You can benefit a lot from a steady stream of new contacts to nurture in the future. They might convert into customers at the year’s natural high points.
5. It’s what your customers are expecting
Modern customers respect and expect responsiveness from the businesses they frequently visit. They need to get an immediate response from their favorite brand. The best is to configure your marketing operation to run constantly with the help of automation technologies. That way, you will be able to provide speedy response times that your customers feel entitled to all the time.
Factors that Prevent Brands from Performing Always-on Marketing
Being always-on needs massive involvement. Hence, you must look into these three factors that prevent brands from leaping always-on marketing:
1. Brands need “usable data.” It means the data you can utilize to increase relevance and personalization. Most brands have comprehensive data but not the type of data that can be used.
2. always-on marketing must be done at scale. Brands need “supporting architecture” in the form of connected systems to provide relevance and personalization. You need these systems to understand and learn about individual behaviors and apply that information to each interaction.
3. always-on marketing is an extremely repetitive process. All new iteration usually requires new content that pursues a sound testing model. When you get started, it can be an initial struggle with handling the content volume and testing consistency.
Final Words
There is no one correct answer when it comes to how and what to deliver with always-on marketing. You will get variant responses when you can ask different experts. However, you need to ensure that you need to be consistent across all your targeted channels where your customers are active and engage on similar products or services through this journey. Therefore, you need to bring changes in your work culture, the consumer-first view, the use of customer data, product marketing, and other marketing functions. The focus and the speed at which you can accomplish AOM will establish your ability to become ever more visible and relevant to your consumers. This always-on marketing approach can let you grow your database and build an efficient marketing operations team that caters to your customers’ expectations thus, resulting in building a trusted brand for them. Hence, It makes real sales benefits in the long term.
If you are planning to adopt this marketing approach and wondering about the best practices that can bring out the best outcome – then, you can always seek to discuss your requirements or use our professional assistance. To start with, you can simply contact us or say “Hi”/“Hello” at info@marrinadecisions.com to get in touch with our experts. Alternatively, you can also DM us on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.