For years, it was commonplace for traditional marketing campaigns to require 90-day planning cycles — at a minimum. More recently, digital marketing has brought about an evolution in both speed and agility that has quickly made these lengthy cycles inadequate and unacceptable.
Customers are increasingly available on their phones, websites and social media platforms, and marketers are finding greater access to real-time data. As a result, a strong opportunity exists to create a pervasive digital buzz that intensifies brand presence while extending campaign reach in unprecedented ways.
Sophisticated marketers (and even novice ones) are embracing tools that deploy campaigns quickly and simultaneously gather data from those campaigns. While the single, static campaigns of old were often hit-or-miss when it came to delivering results at the end of their lengthy cycles, the types of campaigns that modern marketers seek are the ones that produce results in real time. Armed with this immediate insight into how these initiatives are resonating, marketers can tweak and refine campaigns instantly for ultimate campaign performance.
Persistent marketing is more than effective — it’s becoming necessary to achieve lasting customer engagement. But it doesn’t follow the same methodologies as the traditional campaigns we’ve become familiar with that were planned over a 90-day period. Here are three ideas to create a persistent marketing presence that deepens engagement and draws your prospects and customers into the funnel through a much faster and more effective cycle.
Use Data To Evolve & Solidify Your Brand’s Voice
Image via Shutterstock
The voice of your brand is one of your greatest marketing assets. It makes your key messages more memorable, your brand more engaging and credible, and your leads and customers an identity they come to rely upon and trust.
Use the data you collect on a frequent basis to shape a brand voice that’s relevant, effective and meaningful to every audience you’re targeting. Depending on the tools you’re using and the resources you have for monitoring data, this can be done instantaneously.
Having interest and attribute data that’s available on a real-time basis means you can understand how your voice is connecting with each persona.
Don’t wait for a campaign to end to tweak the voice — or the message, for that matter. If you have the data as the campaign is running, use it! When you fine-tune the voice as needed and as data becomes available, you will know exactly what worked and what didn’t — all while the campaign is still running. You can then use that information right away for the next campaign.
Create Community Around Conversation
One of the drawbacks of traditional marketing cycles is that interaction and data collection tend to happen in different stages. Persistent marketing, conversely, doesn’t carry this same limitation. Instead, persistent marketing allows the conversation of the campaign to continue concurrently, alongside data collection. These activities are not mutually exclusive and instead can feed upon one another, unveiling communities and demographics that may have been concealed before.
For instance, let’s say a car company launches a new car. It’s always positioned its branding around the idea of being edgy and unique, yet one of its social media campaigns reveals that a set of customers is specifically concerned with safety. Does this mean the brand’s voice changes? Is the campaign a flop?
No — it means the conversation evolves. The car company uses this insight to kick off a new version of the same campaign, which includes messaging that retains its hallmark edginess without sacrificing safety.
The company doesn’t take down its other campaign, letting it run its intended course. Instead, it launches the new campaign concurrently, targeting the newly identified “safety” community. In doing this, it has segmented its buyers into distinct groups on various channels where more targeted conversations can happen. The car company has now engaged its larger community in a new way, offered heightened value and deepened its impact — all without altering its voice or losing the value of its original campaign.
Again, the inherent idea within persistent marketing is one of expansion. While you will capitalize on the communities you know about and validate that your message is resonating with them, you can also listen for new communities and address their needs quickly. This translates into an expansion of your brand’s reach on a much more frequent basis.
Tailor Existing Campaigns On The Fly
One of digital marketing’s biggest benefits is the immediate interest and attribute data it can offer. This data can span from social media dialogues to site visits that reveal motivations, triggers and challenges. Regardless, any piece of this data can help you measure and tweak campaigns immediately.
Marketers who are accustomed to launching and monitoring single campaigns sometimes miss seeing all of the opportunity within this method. Think of the possibilities that come with collecting data on a campaign that’s only a week old. That data can be analyzed and then used to make simple tweaks to messages or creative content. Or, the campaign can be split into two or three highly targeted new campaigns (as mentioned above), tailored toward very specific subgroups.
This process can be repeated as often as is necessary in order to reach optimal engagement. When the customer feedback and data come to you, you gain direct knowledge as to which demographic groups are responding to which campaign elements. From there, you have the power and ability to drill down even further within those same campaigns.
This process can also be expedited by running alternate campaigns simultaneously. When taking this approach, you can review which campaign has achieved the best performance, and also attain clarity into what types of changes should be made based upon feedback. With the amount of data and deployment tools available, there is simply no reason not to use data in this way, and every reason to do so.
Practicing and refining persistent marketing can deliver significant benefits, from robust customer insights to heightened brand visibility and deeper engagement. By modifying your messages and your overall brand voice in response to real-time data, you can multiply one initial campaign into several, all while intensifying their relevance and performance. The end result is a compelling brand presence your leads and customers can’t resist — and accelerated initiatives that deliver amplified results.
Comments