What is an always on spend strategy?

Always on spend strategy means ensuring that you have are always present on relevant channels using messages that resonate with your customers. This might seem like common sense to a lot. Not a lot of organizations do this. They often prefer an approach of big campaigns in certain periods and dark periods (no ad spend or very little ad spend) in the other periods.

Why should companies have an always on strategy?

1. Consumers are available online almost all day. They are engaging in different activities through this period. This gives you the chance to influence them across various platforms
2. Website browsing for information, news and articles of interest
3. Reading updates from friends, family, celebrities and influencers on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter
4. Career development through networking, posting, applying for jobs via LinkedIn
5. Researching new products, services they are looking to buy via search
6. Browsing new products to buy from their favorite sites
7. Checking newsletters, daily coupons etc from emails
8. Consumers are buying products and services throughout the year. If you don’t show up as an ad, your competition definitely will. So, having an always on strategy is also essential to ensure that you don’t lose out a potential sale to your competition who showed up with ads and offers at the right time
9. Influencing the customer to buy a product/service can take time. Marketing tactics that are run over a period of time with relevant messaging do a better job influencing customers than a periodic burst of a lot of ads

What channels should be considered as part of always on strategies?

Always on strategies should be a good mix of both prospecting and remarketing tactics. Below are some of the strategies that should be considered as part of your always on approach:

1. Paid Search Advertising– Customers are searching through out the year for products and services that you provide. It is important to be present when they search. Customers who search for products are in an active stage of research to buy a product, so showing up definitely puts you in their consideration bucket. It also wins you the potential sale
2. Remarketing – It is important to remarket to customers who are visiting your site but have not yet performed the relevant action like making a purchase.
3. Targeted Prospecting – This involves using relevant channels like Paid Social and display advertising that provide targeting criteria that relate to audiences who are looking for products that you sell. Prospecting in these channels generally will not return the same ROAS as paid search and remarketing. So, appropriate measured and structured targeting should be put in place to really go after audiences that would find your ads relevant.
4. Content Marketing – Some organizations are also smart enough to leverage their public relations and brand teams to create unique pieces of content through the year. These piece of content are then used to drive consumer interest in the products and services of the organization. Marketing organizations leverage these to create always on strategy that involves promoting this content on content marketing channels as well as via organic social posts.

What is the best approach to creating the right marketing strategy?

Right marketing strategy is a mix of always on campaigns as well as big spend campaigns throughout the year, all driving towards the final sales goal. Most of the organizations do a great job planning their big spend campaigns with highly relevant creatives. They often do a very bad job with a few things:

1. Their marketing spend skews completely towards big budget campaigns and always on gets whatever remains. Point being, they do not spend enough of always on strategies
2. Companies always focus their creative efforts on big spend campaigns and forget creative efforts on their always on campaigns. Big campaigns require a lot of planning but are run for a very short time. Consumers forget them after a while but always on campaigns are running through the year. So, they should be getting equal attention if not more.
3. Big budget campaigns are always called awareness play and are never held to the same performance standards as an always on campaign.
4. Companies choose to spend more on big budget campaigns even when their always on campaigns can spend more and drive healthy ROAS.

What is the key takeaway?

Always on tactics drive very healthy ROAS. So, if they have capacity to spend more and drive revenue for you, give them the incremental budget. Big budget campaigns are important only if they drive relevant traffic to your site, increase brand recall and results in additional purchases within a month.