A continuous marketing campaign is of absolute necessity to any brand that does not want to waste their lead generation budget. What a lot of brands embark on is intermittent marketing campaigns and to their misfortune.
Corporate sales and marketing executives agree that at least 50% of their sales effort and 50% of their lead generation budget is wasted on leads that are never contacted, according to a survey at Dreamforce by Conversica.
The American Marketing Association (AMA), on the other hand, reports that 70 percent of marketing leads are never followed up by sales. What really happens is that the marketing department switches attention to developing a new campaign, with a different target group and/or a different theme.
When this happens, the leads from your marketing campaign end up in no man’s land and new short-term campaigns are launched. This will be based on a new lead generation budget from your company.
The attendant result is that new contacts keep entering the marketing funnel. But they don’t convert to sales and revenue since a buyer’s journey may take six, nine or more months, there are no shortcuts to success.
A continuous marketing campaign is necessary for your business because it’s a long-term strategy that focuses on customers’ satisfaction, quality of service, cost, and the market movement. To step up any marketing approach, marketers need to constantly innovate and connect with customers on deeper levels across the entire relationship between consumer and the company.
These are some basic reasons why you should enforce continuous marketing campaign.
- Competitors won’t edge your brand out
The simple truth is that once you are not presenting your business to your target market, someone else will be. A lot of brands go through periods of marketing investment with huge integrated campaigns and waves of advertising activity.
However, once this is not continuous someone else definitely takes over the mantle. Even when the campaigns are specifically for “brand awareness” purposes, you need to remember that audiences have very short memories and loyalty.
Rather than shouting the loudest for a very short period and then going into years of a silent wilderness it is much better to maintain a healthy conversation over a longer period. People tend to forget after a short while.
A classical example is your blog. Once you stop being up to date on your blog, you will see that the traffic will thin out with time and you will slip down the rankings.
- Understanding your customer
A continuous campaign gives your organization a complete insight into the ongoings in the market. You will have a real-time look at who your customers are, how they behave, what they believe, and what they need.
Information is the power you have in the competitive global market and staying informed allows marketers to be proactive rather than passive. If something isn’t working change it. If needed switch the products, message, channels, or budget but do go on
- Creates room for improvement
With intermittent campaigns, when you fail, you fail big. The continuous campaign though may be more financially involving but you have the opportunity to learn from the marketing metrics and key performance indicators (KPI)
Whether you are looking to track digital marketing performance, SEO progress, or your social media growth, having measurable marketing metrics and KPIs set up can help your business reach targets month-over-month. This will afford you a deeper and better understanding of your day to day performance.
The improvements you will initiate as a result of the insight you will gain are necessary for your business. It’s a long-term strategy that focuses on customers’ satisfaction, quality of service, cost, and the market movement.
To step up any marketing approach, marketers need to constantly innovate and connect with customers on deeper levels across the entire relationship between consumer and the company.
- Product differentiation
Momentum is one of the hardest things to get going and it can feel tough in the early days as you try to get that heavy marketing flywheel moving. Once your marketing messages, personal development, stories, differentiation, and campaign approach are all locked down, approved and ready for prime time, building campaigns are quick and highly efficient.
You know what to say, whom to say it to, and how to say it. The challenge to this approach is creating those strategy assets, building out personas and developing disruptive, compelling and emotional messaging demands hard work, takes time, and often requires agreement across a variety of constituents.
This is especially true when it comes to product differentiation. Being different than of all your competition is hard work and often requires commitments to operational upgrades. It also takes time to gain agreement and consensus on what you’re going to commit to publicly.
Finally, it’s important to understand that a great strategy takes time and investment. The time in question comes along with a commitment to being patient and doing the hard work necessary for creating compelling messages that move markets.
Conclusion
Marketing success is more than just a series of an intermittent campaign. It should be continuous, improving over time, rather than the over a short period of time. Marketing efforts and improvements go hand in hand.
What worked now may not work later on. Customers might change their tastes, or market saturation might take place. Through constantly monitoring your marketing metrics, KPI, and performing a continuous improvement, you can have a better chance of increasing your conversion rate.
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