Does your business have a steady stream of customers all year round, or do you alternate between spikes of activity and quieter periods? If you fit the latter description, you probably wish you could maintain these sales peaks while also padding out your revenues for the rest of the year, right?
Or perhaps you face problems building recognition among your target market and securing reliable customers. After all, every one of us has made purchases that we haven’t repeated from places that we can’t even remember.
There’s an answer to both of these predicaments, and it’s called always-on marketing. Simply put, always-on marketing involves keeping your marketing running all year round, rather than stopping and starting according to significant dates.
This allows you to build your brand and reinforce the significance that your business’s name holds in people’s minds, increasing recognition through repeated exposure.
Given that brand building is a critical element of success, your marketing should never really turn ‘off’. Marketing experts Les Binet and Peter Field propose a ratio for ‘optimum effectiveness’ in how you split your marketing budget: spend 60% on branding and 40% on generating sales.
Here are 6 practical benefits of always-on marketing that show why Binet and Field’s emphasis on brand building makes perfect sense.
Did you know that 59% of customers prefer to buy new products from brands they’re familiar with to those they’re not? Even when people are in search of novelty, established trust remains a powerful commodity.
You can’t build a brand with short-term seasonal strategies; you need to put gradual investments of time and money into building your business’s reputation and image. This can only be achieved with an always-on marketing vision, so a brand-first, year-round approach should bring you tangible sales results in the medium-to-long term.
In event-based marketing, you’ll ramp up activity for a particular period, seeing a flurry of sales, which soon drops away.
Always-on marketing continually increases your base level of awareness among your target market. So, when it comes time for another seasonal push, you should get larger spikes than before.
One result of more marketing is… more marketing data! Don’t groan just yet; getting deep into your stats is the only way to improve your performance (and it can be interesting, believe it or not).
Keep your marketing working throughout the year, and you’ll quickly develop credible benchmarks for your success. This window into your performance will be far more valuable than the snapshot provided by event-based marketing strategies, which are prone to being skewed by flukes and seasonal-dependent factors.
If you’re not quite sure where to start in your measuring efforts, download our free, in-depth guide to 5 essential marketing metrics, and then have a look at our recent article on understanding the real effectiveness of online advertising.
Always-on marketing won’t automatically eliminate seasonal peaks and troughs. However, even when people aren’t buying as much, you can still cultivate them as contacts.
Maintaining a strong contact database is an aspect of digital marketing that many businesses overlook in favour of generating sales. However, given that email marketing databases degrade by about 22.5% each year, chronic inattention could leave you without much of an audience to market to!
The solution is an always-on marketing strategy, particularly one revolving around creating quality content that people are happy to exchange their contact details to access. You’ll benefit from a steady stream of new contacts to nurture, who you can then convert into customers at the year’s natural high points.
Maybe we’re all just a bit spoiled these days, but modern customers respect one thing above all from the businesses they frequent – responsiveness.
82% of customers surveyed said that getting an immediate response from a business to a marketing or sales-related question is important or very important to them. This rises to 90% for customer service questions.
People just want to see an end to the hours spent stuck on hold, being forced to listen to piped-in muzak down the phone or refreshing an empty email inbox. And really, who can blame them?
If you configure your marketing operation to run continually with the help of automation technologies like chatbots, you’ll be better able to provide the speedy response times that your customers feel entitled to.
You wouldn’t stop cleaning your premises or refreshing the receipt paper rolls in your till at certain parts of the year, so why allow inconsistencies in a similarly essential part of your business’s success?
Always-on marketing allows you to cultivate a recognised and well-respected brand, cater to your customers’ expectations, grow your database and see real sales benefits in the long term.
If you want to start planning your own promotional schedule for the year ahead, don’t forget to download our special 2020 marketing calendar.
For a consultation on your business’s particular needs and how they could play into your own always-on strategy, get in touch with our marketing experts today.
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