Always-on communications

Always-on communications or marketing (AOM) is gradually serving as a replacement for more traditional campaign-led communications. The rise of multiple digital marketing channels means that it is easier than ever to engage in ongoing communication with your target audience. Not only can this increase engagement, but it also reduces the “radio silence” that can often happen between marketing campaigns.

We recommend an always-on marketing approach as it will help you create a managed communications or contact strategy to prioritize and integrate the full range of marketing communications channels and experiences.

AOM enables you to support prospects and customers on their path-to-purchase using techniques such as persuasive personalized messaging and re-marketing. It also allows you to reinforce your key messaging and form a relationship with your audience, which can pay dividends in the end.

So what are always-on communications?

Alway-son communications are not like campaign communications that have a set budget for a specific period. They are the continuous investment in paid, owned and earned digital media designed to help engage your audience and meet purchase intent.

Your communications can help provide more information on your brand, products and services through a range of channels, methods and content types. Always-on marketing can encompass your website, emails, search, social media and publisher sites.

To be successful with always-on communications, you need to remember to be:

Informative
Engaging
Interesting
Educational
Consistent

Just as with your campaign messaging, your AOM should aim to answer questions customers might have, address pain points and keep them interested in your brand.

If you are using multiple channels, it is also important to keep your communications consistent. Even if your tone or presentation changes slightly to meet the requirements of the channel, you need to maintain consistency in order to create a joined-up experience for your audience.

How do you implement always-on communications?

Marketing automation is a key player when it comes to always-on communications. You want to be able to serve the right messaging at the right time, which means setting up automation to deliver ads, emails, website messaging and more that is triggered by customer actions.

This comes with its own set of challenges, including data management, personalization and regular reviewing of your messaging. You also need to ensure that you aren’t bombarding customers with messages across different channels automatically within a short period of time, as this is just as likely to turn them off your brand as unengaging messaging is.

Regularly auditing your processes, communications and results is always going to be the best way to ensure your implementation of always-on communications via marketing automation is correct and working.

Always-on communication challenges

As more brands take on the AOM approach, it can become more difficult than ever to make your brand stand out. Consumers are used to dealing with numerous brand messages on a daily basis, which can cause them to switch off from advertising and brands online, presenting more challenges for businesses.

There’s also the fact that if a brand doesn’t engage its audience, it’s easy enough for customers to turn to a different brand, with the online domain offering up plenty for them to choose from. However, if you keep your audience engaged, interested and happy, they are more likely to stay put and remain loyal, especially as they don’t want to have to wade through the huge number of other brands on offer.

Consumers are also savvier than ever, especially when it comes to their data and display permissions. Interaction with brands is all done on the customer’s terms, meaning they choose what they see, when they see it and what channels they see it on. This means that relevance is the biggest player in always-on communication strategies.

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