Always-On Marketing isn’t a newer, better way of doing traditional marketing. It’s not bombarding consumers at a faster pace or with a greater amount. It doesn’t mean sending more communications to more people across more channels.
Consumers’ world and expectations have changed. You’re no longer in control of all the messaging about your brand or when consumers can access it. They have the power to create their own content and access your brand whenever and wherever they want. To meet new customer demand and expectations, you need to adapt an Always-On strategy.
What is Always-On Marketing?
Always-On Marketing is defined as data-driven, content-led experiences, delivered across channels and devices in real time.
An Always-On Marketer:
- Pulls data from consumers to anticipate what they want
- Understands the purchase context
- Creates meaningful experiences
- Is personable and sees customers as individuals
Pull Data
In order to create quality marketing content, you need to pull data from your customers. This means listening and understanding the rhythms of each type of consumer.
In order to get a deeper understanding of your customer’s behavior, their pain points, what they talk about, where they spend their time, the best time to push content, and what type of content works best, you can use a variety of tools. For detailed information about consumer behavior on your website, use tools like Google Analytics to get statistics and insights about usability, website traffic, and the performance.
To discover how much engagement your social media posts are getting and what consumers are saying about your brand, use tools like Hootsuite and Social Mention. Because you can never have enough data, for even more detailed data collection methods check out this list.
Researching your consumers’ behavior is a never-ending task. Continuously collect data from your consumers, so you can reach them at the best time and with the most relevant and helpful content. Getting to know your customers will help you build a lasting relationship with them and valuable consumer data will power your marketing content.
Understand the Purchase Context
Just like you should know everything about your consumer, you should understand the purchase context. As consumers move online, there is even more data to be gathered and more opportunities to make sophisticated and effective offers. This means knowing the time, place, location, and emotion that enables the consumer to easily and simply engage with your products or services and knowing how your products are used, talked about, bought, and viewed.
The context helps us know when we should promote content, what content we should promote, and how to promote it. For example, if an angry customer calls customer service to complain, she’s probably not going to be interested in the product offers playing while she waits on hold. But she might welcome it if you email her with a product offer another time. This is why the Always-On Marketer must pay attention to the emotional state of their customers. Time and day can also help guide an online strategy. For instance, airlines can jack their prices on Sunday evenings because more people search then than during the week.
Create Meaningful Experiences
Once you know more about your consumers, you’ll be able to define the experience you want them to have. Experiences are vital because digital marketing has raised the bar. People are more socially connected and spend more time online than ever before. Consumers now access brands multiple times per day demanding instant information. To adapt to the new super-connected consumer, marketing is making a shift from campaigns to real-time experiences.
In the online world of influencer opinions, branded content, and online reviews, consumer experiences stand out above the rest. Experiences are what attract and engage customers moment-to-moment. They provide value and benefits tailored to consumers individual needs and tastes.
Once you know more about their behavior, what they care about, and their emotions during each stage of the brand experience, you should find ways to increase the positive feelings associated with the buying process and give them reason to continue and share their experience.
When you design a brand experience, design for people. The experience should teach something, provide exclusive access, entertain, inspire creativity, be fun, and use creative storytelling.
You should use a consistent overall look and feel when you communicate your brand promise. A consistent experience should be reflected in every consumer touchpoint.
To keep up with consumer demand, content should be planned and continuously optimized with the ability to respond to consumer interactions with your brand. If you make a meaningful branded experience with your consumers and listen to their feedback, it could likely lead to repeat business, loyal customers, and powerful influencers.
Be Personal
To break through the mess of marketing content, Always-On Marketing is personal. Consumers desire human connection but they don’t listen to Joe Shmo the CEO they want to connect with their peers. As an online marketer, you should have a persona like your target audience which means changing your tone from the voice of authority to the voice of a peer.
Today, personalization and self-expression is a way of life. To adapt to this, you should add personality to every aspect of your marketing. 40% of consumers buy more from retailers who personalize the shopping experience and personalized email marketing can generate 20% increase in revenue. Treating customers like individuals instead of a large anonymous group is key. Getting personal can help you nurture your customers through the path to purchase.
Although changing your brand’s voice to be more approachable is a great way to increase sales, you should also be using influencers to generate and share branded content with their social networks. User-generated content is 50% more trusted than other forms of media. Even if you put a personal spin on your company Facebook page, only 69% of people trusted branded websites compared to 84% of people that trust recommendations from people they know. Including an Influence Marketing strategy in your Always-On marketing will help you drive more sales on social.
One of the best ways to fuel your Always-On Marketing and Influence Marketing strategies is to own a branded community. Using Mavrck’s algorithm, you’ll be able to invite your most relevant and influential consumers to a private community. This will make it easy to collect rich data and feedback, help you to make more meaningful experiences, and allow you to get personal with your customers by activating your influencers to share with their networks.
