What are the benefits of the always-on approach? The short explanation is – because you are ready to engage with our audience when they’re ready. But first, let’s start with what it means always-on for us as marketers.

What always-on means for marketers

Always-on means that you are ready to engage with your audience when they’re ready. It means having your campaigns and plans already in place, not launching campaigns in the traditional sense when your business is ready to reveal something new. Our big takeaway from this is: that it’s not about when we’re ready to promote a campaign, it’s about when our audience is looking for that product or service. 

We think always-on activities are great practice for businesses because you build what your customers need or want that they can access when it’s the right time for them. Think of it sort of like always-on lead generation efforts. This also means that the activities can be online, in-store, or a mix of both. 

The key to always-on activities is to be relevant right when your audience is looking for the product or service your business offers. But be sure to let the data be your guide.

Always-on means = continuous advertising which (ideally) never stops

But to be always-on in marketing has two different aspects, which I tried to differentiate into two parts:

• Soft reasons for continuous advertising strategy – how does it influence your brand, your brand awareness, business, customers’ decision-making and “desire to shop” right here and right now, and many other aspects not connected with technical solutions?
• Technical reasons – which are more connected with data, AI of ad serving systems, audience collections/data collection, SEO, and data consistency (for AI and marketers, who manage campaigns).

I believe that many of us had to sometimes explain to the board or to non-marketing personnel (sales, IT, or any other company department) why it is important not to run campaigns with brake and gas style. So if you are now in the same position and you are looking for some “fancy reasons” for your presentation, feel free to use these down there. Below these shortlists, you will find more sophisticated explanations in case you need them.

Also if you find any other reasons, please write them in the comments and I will add them to this list. The more reasons we will have there, the bigger chance “other people” will find this article, understand why it is not a clever decision, and maybe will not try to stop our campaigns in the future. 🙂

Soft aspects for continuous advertising (short version)

• Constant „top of mind“ awareness
• Continual lead and data collection
• We are there when customers need us
• Understanding our customers + room for improvement
• Reliable sales cycle/revenue streams
• Educate your consumers, prospects, or potential customers
• You can test, adjust, and repeat constantly = better performance
• Complete overview of the market situation
• Proper marketing messaging/products/pricing
• Fine-tuned processes thanks to feedback from customers

Tech aspects for continuous advertising (short version)

• SEO – we don’t lose visibility on Google, traffic as rankings decrease, leads + competitors will overtake us
• AI of ads systems has enough data
• Well performing ads
• Bigger target list (audience, emails, other contacts) for main campaigns
• Historical data for better marketing decisions
• Complete overview of the market situation based on hard data

+ we have well set properly all processes = no new big surprises before main season campaigns (something doesn’t work, we didn’t look at something, we forgot something, etc.)

Soft reasons – why to run campaigns continuously (more detailed explanation)

• Constant „top of mind“ awareness – more than half (60%) of consumers around prefer to buy products from a familiar brand than to switch to a new brand. If he has ever heard of us = chances are that he will choose our product.
• Establishing brand authority in the market – effective brand awareness can be achieved through effective advertisements produced for ad campaigns that intend to develop a positive understanding of your brand name or improve negative existing perceptions to position your brand as the No.1 choice for related products or services.These kinds of advertisements should concentrate on your company values, your product quality, your reasonable rates method, how professional your company customer support options are, and your long-term first concern is your consumers’ complete satisfaction.Visual ads like video ads are a suitable choice for branding ads as they increase the ad recall for a longer duration and attain instant acknowledgment when the targeted audience is exposed to anything related to your brand name.
• Continual lead and data collection – the more leads you collect throughout the year, the bigger targeted list you have to market it during seasonal peaks. Plus old outdated ad audiences will not work well (simply people who interacted with ads 6 months ago are probably having different needs now = lower conversion/engagement rate + we need to build audiences again practically from zero again and again constantly).
• We are there when customers need us – it’s not about when we’re ready to promote a campaign, it’s about when our audience is looking for our products or services = increase in sales.
• Understanding our customers + room for improvement – complete insight into the ongoings in the market (who our customers are, how they behave, what they believe, how they interact, and what are their needs).
• We can test, adjust, and repeat constantly = so we know when we need to switch the products, message, channels, or budget and what worked well before the main campaign has to start. We’re continually seeing what makes our audience click to call-to-action button, enter a promotion, go to our website, sign-up for a newsletter or simply engage with our brand and help us to better understand what our audience responds to the best.
• More stable sales cycles – advertising leads to sporadic sales cycles. One quarter is a boom, while the next is a bust. Unless you’re running a part-time business on your own, this makes it very difficult to budget for fixed costs, like employee salaries and overhead. By using a continuous advertising strategy, you can build on your successes, escalate sales, invest more in marketing, and escalate sales even more. Even seasonal products, with the possible exception of snow shovels, can have sales in off months, as a large percentage of customers will want to plan ahead.
• Educate your consumers, prospects, or potential customers – being 100% persuaded about which service or product is suitable to satisfy your needs is what inspires clients to complete a purchase. Ads can be utilized to educate your consumers about the usages of available items or services and how they can depend upon what you’re using to fix associated individual or business problems for prospective consumers. Promoted informative content related to targeted customers’ needs and problems will demonstrate thought leadership or industry leadership for your business and increase trust in choosing your business over competitors. Video advertisements like YouTube ads or television ads can be used likewise to educate your consumers about how to utilize your items to satisfy their requirements(like item tutorials or how-to videos).
• Complete overview of the market situation – you know what are the needs of your audience. How do they react, and if the pricing is well set or not. If there are any other (and better) competitors and how they communicate and what they offer. So no big surprises before the main campaign launch.
• To have a vessel for customer feedback – if there is a gap somewhere in our processes or in another area – we know about these weak points early on, as soon as the problem appears and we can fix it in advance again before the main campaign launch. We don‘t have to fix it during the main seasonal campaign which can critically influence the whole campaign and the company performance. We can also react more quickly to changes in the market because we get instant feedback from our customers during the whole year
• Product differentiation – momentum is one of the hardest things to get going and it can feel tough in the early days as you try to get that heavy marketing flywheel moving.Once your marketing messages, personal development, stories, differentiation, and campaign approach are all locked down, approved and ready for prime time, building campaigns are quick and highly efficient.You know what to say, whom to say it to, and how to say it. The challenge to this approach is creating those strategy assets, building out personas and developing disruptive, compelling and emotional messaging demands hard work, takes time, and often requires agreement across a variety of constituents.This is especially true when it comes to product differentiation.Being different than of all your competition is hard work and often requires commitments to operational upgrades. It also takes time to gain agreement and consensus on what you’re going to commit to publicly.Finally, it’s important to understand that a great strategy takes time and investment. The time in question comes along with a commitment to being patient and doing the hard work necessary for creating compelling messages that move markets.
• Supporting other company operations – as we discussed previously, advertising is (or should be) a part of your organization’s marketing strategy and ads work when they achieve the wanted objectives and support the operation of other departments consisting of:
  • Educate your customers about your service to assist in consumer service activities (we already covered it above).
  • Establish a background understanding of your services or products to assist salesmen in their mission.
  • The hiring of top talents – for great campaigns you need great staff. If your brand sucks, you will have a problem getting top talents in.
  • We could also mention that in case you minimize extreme peaks because you will be able to spread sales over the whole year, you will also minimize the possibility of a major failure (products out of stock), but your employees and suppliers will be under less pressure and will also have time to rest or at least prepare for the upcoming peak of the season.

Technical reasons – why to run campaigns continuously (more detailed explanation)

• SEO – we lose:
  • Visibility on Google
  • Traffic as rankings decrease
  • Leads and competitors will not overtake us – main webpages are unlikely to keep their top-ranking places if there is no new content or links, targeting keywords, fixing tech issues, and remaining authoritative. Pages won’t immediately fall off of their current page rank, but we can expect to see a precipitous decrease in rankings as time goes on and it can take months to get back to the original positions and if our competitors are doing SEO constantly, we will never overtake them (because we lost momentum – sites/domains/pages are not updated often enough and the search engine’s algorithm need weeks or months to see that something has changed = before the search engine can react to any change = the campaign came to the end).

• AI of ads system – the whole PPC ecosystem is based on AI. Simply it needs user data to be able to serve our ads to the right customers at the right time. When we stop the campaign and run it again, the system will target the wrong users who will probably not interact well with current campaigns and has to learn it again from the beginning – because the PPC AI has old data and these audiences had different needs than now (imagine campaign targeting audience from summer vs winter audience = completely different needs). The more data AI of the PPC system has, the better results will be. By running short campaigns, you’re effectively starving the system of data until you all of a sudden need the system to work perfectly on very short notice. This often leads to inferior, more expensive results as the system didn’t have enough time and data to make good predictions about your potential customers. If you regularly feed the system data through running campaigns, the algorithm will be much more prepared to predict who your best customers are, how to find the cheapest prices for you, and where your highest potential for sales is. Chances are if you feel a campaign has not achieved the results you wanted, simply feeding the system more data may have been enough to improve data.
• Outdated ads/ads not performing well – even though pausing and resuming a campaign, ad group, keyword, or ad won’t affect the quality score or historical data, it will certainly affect performance in case you did not change your ads and did some kind of testing. For continuous campaigns, this part is done during the whole year as ads are adjusted/tested constantly. Plus when a campaign does not perform well, we as „marketers“ can check/compare/do analysis and understand well what happened. Why the performance is good or wrong => compared to other campaigns in the past. When we have no whole history data, our view is very limited.