Always-On Marketing: Embrace Content, Kill the Campaign

Marketing campaigns don’t work. Your team or your agency defines a message, you pick a favorite creative approach, and a paid media channel, and hope that it will work?

Then, you stop right when you get all the learning because your budget runs out. This is why always-on content marketing wins every time: each piece of content is a test. You learn every time you publish and share. You optimize over time. And your goals are more likely to be achieved.

According to CMI, only 9% of B2B marketers believe that their content strategy is effective. Although most B2B small businesses use content marketing, most of them are a total flop.

It’s not only B2B businesses that fail. Failure comes from strategies that forgo always-on content marketing in favor of campaigns and other one-off efforts.

Lack of a strategy is a bullet train to failure. I’ve seen businesses of all sizes and types that have a strategy – and still fail.

The reason is their strategy revolved around one-off content and campaigns. Here’s how your marketing strategy can avoid this major cause of content marketing failure.

Quick Takeaways:

• Always-on content marketing keeps you ahead of the trends.
• A data-based strategy makes optimizing always-on marketing possible.
• Center your strategy on your customers and their needs.

Stay Ahead of the Trends with an Always-On Approach

With content marketing becoming more and more competitive, you can’t afford a spotty strategy. Only a seamless, always-on content marketing strategy will deliver the results that can catapult you beyond the ordinary and into the realm of thought leadership.

Are you everywhere where your target customers hang out? Do your messages reach them at the right time?

You see, campaigns and one-off content *try* to be relevant – on the cutting edge. You know, the yearly holiday campaigns. Or the one-off content, like the glut of “COVID-19 and your business” content that ballooned like a mushroom cloud at the height of the pandemic.

But campaign-led brands are always one step behind that cutting edge. An always-on strategy has the inside track on trends, breaking news, and the latest word on industry innovations.

That’s because these brands’ listening, their consumption, and their production of content are everywhere their target customers need to be, 24/7. For that reason, campaign-led brands often come up a day late and a dollar short.

With information flowing in – literally, at the speed of light – you need a strategy that moves at warp speed. As the Metia team pointed out, for brands whose content strategy leads with campaigns, two things can happen – both of which result in a revenue bleed.

1. Campaigns cause engagement spikes, which inevitably lead to drop-offs. During that engagement downtime, your customers might flit over to your competitor, who just started her campaign. That’s the nature of the beast.
2. With so many ways for customers to engage with a brand online, campaigns often “get lost in the noise.”

With always-on content marketing, you’re there for your customers, solving their problems 24/7. People are searching for answers to content marketing questions every day. So I try to publish answers to those questions as often as I can.

Not only do we publish content that solves these problems, but we also make a habit of listening – and responding to our customers on social media, on chat, on email – everywhere.

Here’s my friend Robert Rose who agrees with me:

Use a Data-Based Strategy to Deliver Always-On Solutions

There’s another advantage to always-on content: systematic optimization. When you put data to work for you through effective content analytics, you can test each piece of content to identify your top performers.

Promote them on social media. Use them to create new pieces of content. Repurpose the tips you published on your blog post into a how-to video for more visual learners.

Revise your poorly performing or outdated content to meet your customers’ needs more efficiently. Then, test it again, tweak, and repeat – until it gains traction with your target audience.

Always-on marketing also gives you the ability to personalize your content to your customers’ needs. Comments and feedback, as well as the information you can glean about them through analytics (such as their likes, preferences, online behavior, demographics, and pain points), allow you to provide the exact information they need to solve their problems – at just the time they need it.

Listen to Your Customers and Respond to Their Needs

You’d think you need a huge team to accomplish all that. But you’d be wrong.

With the scope of today’s data and analytics capabilities, even a startup or small business can put the power of always-on marketing to work for it. We at Marketing Insider Group know that power first-hand.

With only five years in business and a small staff, we’ve used our always-on marketing to rank number one on Google for our target keywords, get a million visitors, and gain a wealth of loyal clients that range from Fortune 500 firms to startups like ourselves.

We just use content analytics to find the questions our target customers ask, use the keywords they use in their searches, and write, speak, and produce video content that answers their questions, solve their problems, and serve as a source of thought leadership.

And, of course, we use this always-on strategy to do the same for our clients, delivering the kinds of search traffic increases that result in more sales. Since always-on content marketing is about the most cost-effective strategy you can employ, their ROI is massive.

With such a data-driven, always-on approach, your costs are few, yet your potential is unlimited. If you are ready to drive this kind of traffic to your site with quality content published consistently, check out our Content Builder Service.

Set up a quick consultation, and I’ll send you a free PDF version of my books. Get started today – and generate more traffic and leads for your business.