Always on marketing. Have you switched it on?

Always on Marketing. Are you switched on to the potential benefits it can have for your organisation?

‘Always On’ marketing is an important aspect of marketing for any small business, social enterprise, charity and blue-chip organisation.

If it’s not part of your marketing strategy, you may well be missing out on lead generation, accelerated sales cycles and customer retention. It’s the type of marketing that will build top-line growth if planned and executed well.

This chinwag is will be helpful to small business owners, solo entrepreneurs and marketers who manage in-house teams. It takes approximately four minutes to read and hopefully you will have gained some extra marketing know-how that will benefit your business in positive ways.

‘Always On’ marketing means certain aspects of your marketing efforts never stop working. It is an ongoing, non-campaign driven approach that allows you to reach your prospects and existing customers 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

It works because brand experiences and marketing communications promoting your business, products, offers and purpose is available on-demand when your customers need them. For it to work, marketers need to anticipate the information, messages and convincers needed when ideal customers access your organisation outside of normal working hours.

Why is this important?

Research tells us that 51% of consumers want businesses to address their needs at all times of the day. So ‘always on’ marketing becomes a vital part of your marketing mix because it enables you to give consumers and buyers the opportunity to educate themselves about your product or service at all times, not just when your bricks and mortar store is open or you have staff in manning the phones.

For instance, your business hours may be Monday – Friday, from 9 am till 6 pm. If a consumer is thinking about booking tickets, buying from you or wondering how you can solve their problem during the middle of the night, your ‘always-on’ marketing must work hard to pull them towards your organisation at that very moment. So, if they want to download an e-book at 2 am, they should be able to at ease even though you are officially closed for the day. To do this effectively, you need to be one step ahead, placing relevant messages and content in the right places at any given time.

At the heart of ‘always on’ marketing lies a planned, integrated approach. You need to think in advance what an individual may want to see, hear or read based on their experiences, motivations and requirements for seeking out your brand product or service.

Start by asking yourself – what are you doing to support customers with their decision making throughout the day. Can they access your brand when at a time that to suit them? Or is it only possible to gain access to your organisation and brand during opening times? And finally, are you available on the communication channels where your ideal customers are most receptive to hearing from and about your offering.

If you’re not sure you’ve ticked all the boxes, revisit your customer journey mapping to see if there are any gaps in your communication plan. Doing this exercise is worth your time and effort as knowing how they move from being ‘interested’ to ‘engaged’ to ‘convinced’ to ‘purchaser’ will help you understand and value what key brand touch-points you need to have in place.

Often ‘always on’ marketing is called inbound digital marketing. Whatever approach you choose to take in your organisation, you need marketing that is always switched on and ready to be served at any time of the day when our ideal customer is likely to engage.

Generally ‘always on’ marketing activities include:

• A seamless and user-friendly website experience
• Good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) so people can find you
• Google My Business listings to highlight great reviews and updates
• Display advertising and retargeting so people are served gentle reminders
• Regular posting on social media platforms to stay top of mind
• PPC advertising (Google, YouTube, Microsoft was Bing) to find new reach
• Social media advertising (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram) to reach target audiences
• Gated content such as e-book and case study downloads to build an email list
• Bricks and mortar signage for out of hours presence
• Vehicle signage for added out of hours presence
• Product packaging to continuously remind people of your messaging

Other marketing initiatives such as videos, direct mail, PR, speaker presentations, advertising, 48 sheets (billboards) and tradeshows form more of what we call ‘push’ campaign marketing which aims to achieve a short term impact during a product launch.

You may find yourself doing both ‘always on’ and campaign marketing at the same time.  Both of these approaches t marketing should work together rather than pull target customers in two different directions with conflicting messaging.

When we help our clients market their brands, we encourage them to take a customer-centric approach to their ‘always on’ marketing. It works best when there is a deep understanding of consumer behaviour.

This means exploring your customer’s psyche to understand their pains, challenges, emotional drivers as any content you create needs to be valuable and helpful. Think about what motivates them to buy, how they buy and why they might consider you over your competitors. Don’t shy away from any objections they will raise. Tackle them head-on as it shows you’ve thought about their purchasing or access needs in-depth.

Also, remember to take context into consideration. Context is everything in any form of communication. An individuals location, time of day, competitor activity, political trends and emotive occurrences will all have an impact on how your marketing is received. Sadly many big brands were slow to alter their always-on marketing messaging during the pandemic. Airlines still continued to advertise discounted flights weeks after the travel ban had been imposed and no one could travel for some time.

The way your products and services are consumed, referred to and purchased will highlight all of the different approaches you could take to implementing ‘always on’ marketing. Continually look at insights from consumer data, trends and social listening to really understand why you need to craft messages and creative in a certain way.

Be of service to people and try to ensure your customer’s experience is a good one. Prospects don’t always recollect the words you use but they will remember the way you made them feel when they engaged with your brand.

To help you run ‘always on’ marketing effectively, we’ve come up with three key pre-requisites you need to consider before putting any brand communications in place.

Firstly make sure you have a clear objective of what your prospect or customers need so that you assist their purchasing journey, not confuse it. There is no value in using ‘always on’ marketing if it doesn’t address circumstances or issues that come up as part of their decision-making process. Your strategy needs to be clear and communicated to supporting teams who are involved with delivering your ‘always on’ marketing objectives.

Secondly, be consistent. Connect the dots so your ‘always on’ marketing expresses the same message across the different channels and customer touchpoints you choose to use. See people as complete individual, not just in one role. We all wear many hats.  Never assume you only ever have one opportunity to communicate with them.

Thirdly, test and refine your ideas. As your prospect and customer’s buying patterns evolve and change over time, don’t be afraid to adapt and experiment. Use insights from data to assess if your marketing initiatives need to stay as they are, be tweaked or even stopped. If you see a lack of interest, ask are there gaps? Am I missing some key touchpoints? If you identify interest but see little to no lead generation, look at your messaging. Does it resonate? In either scenario, don’t continue with ineffective marketing. Look at the data and use the insights to confidently adapt.

So having read this far, can you afford not to have ‘always on’ marketing in place. We hope this chinwag, if nothing else, has switched you on to all the benefits ‘always on’ marketing can bring to your organisation.

Think about it.

Suppose your brand, cause, product or service information isn’t immediately available when a prospect is researching your offer. What is the likelihood that they go somewhere else?

In conclusion, ‘always on’ marketing will benefit you because it helps you shorten your sales cycle, increase your opportunities to reach new customers, build relationships with your customers and even reach a global audience.

‘Always on’ marketing needs content and lots of it along with considered brand touchpoints. The desire and need to create all of this can place a lot of strain on stretched marketing teams and solo business owners. Our creative and marketing teams can work with you to create your ‘always-on’ marketing.

As your brand is built on a collection of unique touchpoints, we will identify every customer and internal team interaction you need to consider and then we will professionally create the brand communications you need. No matter how unique or straight-forward they are. We help lots of organisations in this way and love doing it.