Why do only 29% of B2B marketers consider their content strategy to be very successful? It may be because the remaining 71% are abandoning continuous marketing in favor of traditional one-off campaigns that no longer work.
At the same time, the always-on approach always gives results. By constantly publishing content, you get useful information to optimize your approach and achieve your goals.
Let’s find out why a continuous content strategy is the new gold standard of marketing and how exactly you can start using it.
Key points
- Continuous marketing is a constant flow of content and the proper use of automation tools to achieve this goal.
- Continuous content marketing is challenging, but you’ll succeed if you’re prepared to tackle the challenges of finding useful data and integrating tools.
- When you get started, take one step at a time and optimize old content for quick results.
- Focus on your customers and their needs and be patient to achieve excellent long-term results.
Stay ahead of trends with continuous marketing
As the name suggests, always-on marketing involves non-stop marketing efforts that have a continuous effect. How can this be achieved?
When you provide evergreen content that benefits a prospect or customer at any stage of the sales funnel, your efforts remain relevant indefinitely. You don’t need a marketing team constantly promoting your brand, because valuable information itself attracts qualified leads.
Why Traditional Advertising Campaigns Don’t Work Anymore
Compare the always-on strategy to the outdated and expensive campaign method. First, your team selects a marketing message and determines the appropriate creative approach. Then, you launch the campaign and hope that it works (i.e., cross your fingers and wait).
This approach may or may not be successful. Once you finally start to understand what is working (or not) and why, it’s time to call it a day because your advertising budget is running low.
With continuous and constantly updated content, you will achieve results that will take you beyond the ordinary and allow you to become a thought leader. You will be consistently in the sights of your target customers and make them relevant offers at the right time.
How to Know if Continuous Marketing is Working
Why are we so confident that continuous marketing works? Because we have seen it succeed and be a huge success time and time again.
Companies that practice continuous marketing publish content every day that solves problems and answers questions for their target audience.
One of the proponents of continuous marketing, Marketing Insider Group, has achieved the #1 ranking in Google for targeted keywords with always-on content in just a few years as a boutique agency. They have also attracted a million visitors and gained a ton of repeat customers, from Fortune 500 firms to small and medium-sized businesses.
By following a continuous marketing strategy, you can achieve the same results. (If you want to get started right now, we’d love to help!)
Removing potential obstacles when implementing the always-on approach
Getting the content marketing perpetual motion machine going takes a ton of effort. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it, right?
Prepare yourself to overcome the following obstacles to avoid stumbling as you build your own continuous marketing strategy.
1. Create a constant stream of content
While always-on marketing always includes content, content creation is not necessarily part of an ongoing strategy. The content marketing landscape is becoming increasingly competitive, so you can’t afford to be inconsistent.
It’s especially difficult to consistently produce creative content if you’re not a writer. Plus, writing a good blog post can take half a day, even for professionals.
In most cases, the best solution is to outsource content marketing. This will allow you to focus on what your company does best, while ensuring that your offerings are not going unnoticed.
2. Search for useful data
In today’s data-driven marketplace, finding information is no longer difficult. The challenge lies in analyzing it. You need to understand what data is actionable and provides useful insights.
First, identify which tools to add to your MarTech stack to learn more about your target audience. Check which metrics and conversions really matter to create a continuous marketing strategy that delivers real results.
3. Integration of infrastructure and systems
A mechanic may have a powerful wrench and strong bolts, but if they don’t fit together, he’ll have a hard time finishing the repair. Likewise, you may have great MarTech tools, but will they fit with your other solutions?
Before you start automating, you need to make sure you have everything aligned. Don’t consolidate data if your CRM, inventory, and HR systems are all separate and you can’t see the connections.
Gradually build an infrastructure for continuous marketing that collects all the information you have at your disposal. Then you will see where you need to focus to meet demand.
4. Endurance and patience
Long-term planning requires patience. This is quite difficult for people who want to achieve clear results as soon as possible.
A marketer must test hypotheses, refine ideas, and iterate until a formula for success is developed. Success takes time.
Luckily, you can always look to companies that have done it before. If you partner with an experienced content marketing firm, it’s entirely possible to see great results in just a few months — like lower cost per lead and higher conversion rates.
Develop a Continuous Marketing Strategy with These Tips
If you’re ready to start using always-on marketing, use the following tips to ensure success.
Start with small steps
Remember that great marketing starts with building strong relationships with your customers. No matter what you see in the movies, strong relationships are built from many small positive actions, not a few grand gestures.
What kind of user experience makes your target audience feel warm and fuzzy? Identify what appeals to one or two segments and focus on that type of content.
Again, we’ve found that consistency and systematization are incredibly important in the early stages. It’s easy to start off with a bang and then suddenly stall, so make sure you’re posting at least one blog post a week and staying active on social media.
Repurpose successful content for an always-on strategy
As mentioned earlier, continuous marketing is data-driven. Use it to systematically optimize by learning from what has worked in the past.
Arm yourself with the following tips:
- promote longreads on social networks;
- Use content from one channel to create new materials for other channels;
- To expand your audience, rework the tips you’ve published on your blog into a video;
- Rework ineffective or outdated content to better meet customer needs.
Once you see the first results of the always-on approach, re-evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Make changes and repeat the process until you achieve success with your target audience.
Listen to your customers and respond to their needs
Use analytics to learn everything you can about your target audience: their likes, preferences, online behavior, demographics, and pain points. This research will allow you to provide potential customers with the information they need to solve their problems at the most appropriate time.
However, don’t rely on software for all your information. Interact with your audience to understand how to personalize your content to their needs. Read comments and reviews.
Paying close attention will help you tailor your content to each segment, which is essential to content marketing success.
Start using continuous marketing today
With continuous marketing, your costs are low and the potential is unlimited. Want to drive traffic to your site with quality content? Then use our services right now!
