“What is always-on marketing?” you ask.
Imagine this scenario. Your prospective customer is at home, watching the news. She hears something that shocked her—something that makes her fear for the direction of her industry. She begins to search on her phone for something, anything that could protect her company from that problem.
Now, imagine that your company provides exactly the service that can keep her company thriving. But when she goes to your website, she sees only stale content. You closed at 5, so she can’t pick up the phone. She downloads a white paper, only to find that the topic merely addresses part of her needs.
You may have just lost your chance to reach out to that prospect.
As Sean Callahan pointed out in his LinkedIn interview with Matt Heinz, “Our buyers are looking for information 24/7. We need to be where they are, whenever they’re ready for us.
Not closed for the day, relaxing at home with some sitcom blaring in the background. But since we can’t be there in person, there’s no need for our marketing to chill out when we do.
That’s where always-on marketing comes in.
It’s much more than just having a website up 24/7 and social media feeds running ‘round the clock.
As Brad Wikstrom puts it, always-on marketing delivers “remarkable brand experiences at scale” wherever and whenever opportunities to deliver those experiences happen.
You might ask, “What does it take to do that—magic fairy dust?”
Glad you asked. Systematic optimization. That’s the key.
Instead of redesigning your website every few years, systematic optimization is a constant process. Like evolution. Let’s explore this further and the other benefits of always-on marketing.
Continuous Improvement Works as Well for Marketing as It Does for Products
The Agile method of development is all the rage among product and service designers and developers. It relies on continuous improvement—a workflow that improves by iteration, tests the prototype on users, and then comes back to the drawing board to work out any issues and produce a better product.
That same principle works just as well when it comes to content workflow.
Use content analytics to find your best performers—those pieces of content or on-site tools that bring in the most leads, conversions, or sales—whatever metric you want to emphasize. Compare them to see if you can find commonalities among them.
Then tweak your website content, social media posts, e-books, videos, or other digital assets to include those characteristics that your target customers found so enticing. Don’t stop. Keep improving every experience that matters for your target customer groups.
The key to success is data-directed iteration.
That’s nothing new. Legendary marketer David Ogilvy has preached this long before Big Data became a thing for more than NASA scientists.
Today’s marketers have the tools to do a lot more than those 20th-century legends of Madison Avenue did.
Like personalization. Once you take a deep dive into your content measurement data and find out who it is that responds to your message (like supplying their email address or clicking through to your website) but doesn’t buy, you can—with remarketing tools—reach them with a message personalized to their needs.
With today’s AI-driven marketing tools, you can do just that. Connected systems that link your sales data with your marketing data and all the personal data of potential customers can be a treasure trove you can use to meet each person’s needs at scale—and at speed.
With machine learning, these connected systems can even learn about each user’s behavior, acquiring more and more knowledge about each person with every interaction.
You’ve probably experienced the results of this technology on a personal level. After you search for something, a marketing message pops up that seems to have read your mind. Technology isn’t quite that advanced yet, but its predictive ability is the next best thing.
As you probably already know from personal experience – for B2C sales, that’s a game-changer. But what about B2B sales—like the example at the beginning of our post?
The Benefits of Always-On Marketing for B2B Marketing
For B2B companies, always-on marketing is a match made in heaven. As Martech Today’s Sonjay Ganguly points out, nurturing every lead is the key to B2B success.
That strategy is so essential because in most businesses, as opposed to with consumers, there are at least a few decision-makers that need to approve the purchase. Without targeted, personalized messaging that addresses every decision-maker’s specific concern, your sales team will come up against a roadblock after roadblock.
With the personalization at scale that always-on marketing offers, account-based marketing (ABM) becomes possible.
- The head engineer could receive an article about the effectiveness of a company’s new gadget to cut costs by saving time and energy.
- The CFO could receive messaging that gives a close estimate of the amount the company could save if it bought the gadget.
- The CEO might appreciate messaging that shows that with this new high-tech gadget in the mix, their company would likely rise in authority among the industry’s elite.
When you combine this with the ability to look at each recipient’s past online behavior, likes, and interests, the level of personalization you could achieve is nothing short of astonishing. Furthermore, when your sales team collaborates with your marketing team on such a personalized approach, they’re more likely to be aware of their potential customers’ concerns—and more likely to get the meetings they need to close the sale, thanks to your advance messaging.
With the timing being just right on every message, thanks to always-on marketing’s ability to deliver the perfect message at just the right time, you’ll have a lot more leads that come through for the sale.
Make the Switch to Always-On Marketing as Part of an Evolving Strategy
Just like the process your development and design teams undertake to deliver a new product, making the switch to always-on marketing works best on an iterative basis, as Wikstrom advises. First, find the most crucial make-or-break moments in your customers’ journey. Next, create content; test it, and if works, put it out there at scale.
Keep finding those moments. Keep tweaking it, testing it, and then unleash it. Make sure that your content is timely, personalized, and tailored to your customers’ needs. With a content calendar grounded in a content marketing platform that’s up to the task, you’ll be on your way.
If you’re ready to make the switch, DivvyHQ can help you with the journey to always-on marketing. Get in touch with our team today.