With "Always on" to success

Everyone is talking about disruption, digitization and big data. In marketing, too, because the resulting media shift is changing user behavior. This is also reflected in advertising budgets: online spending is increasing, TV and radio remain attractive, print is steadily losing ground. Has the change thus reached media strategies? Only partially, because while consumers are virtually always reachable, many marketers and their media agencies are still trapped in old thought patterns.

The barriers of classical marketing

Classic push marketing still invests in reach and equates this with advertising impact. The campaigns have a limited duration with a predefined start and end time. The insistence on the classic customer journey with fixed target groups restricts the cross-media look. All this results in separate budget pots per campaign or for the individual channels. And thus prevents strategies that do justice to the agile user behavior of consumers. A rethink is urgently needed. Although consumers still use traditional channels, they are no longer dependent on them. Mobile and always online thanks to smartphones or tablets, consumers look for the information they want, where they want it.

In order to break through the deadlocked processes in campaign management, "always on" offers a contemporary alternative as a strategy. Loosely translated, one could speak of "continuous operation": Only those who provide context-dependent experiences in real time via diverse channels and end devices will reach consumers. Of course, such continuous operation would not be efficient, i.e., financially viable. That's why "always on" adds a data-driven component. Put simply, consumer data enables immediate and personalized responses to consumers' digital interactions.

Lean management in marketing

To make this possible, "always on" strategies are based on the concept of lean management. By means of permanent analyses, user behavior is anticipated and the content of a campaign is adapted to the needs of customers in real time. The repetitive components of this strategy are continuous monitoring of relevant content, target groups, as well as capturing snapshots and identifying trends. These analyses form the basis for implementing and controlling appropriate measures.

The data for this monitoring is very diverse and comes from numerous sources. For example, owned media can be used to analyze target groups and their behavior on the company's own website. Furthermore, interaction and conversion rates can be continuously derived from CRM data, social media analyses, or search monitoring evaluations. Such dynamic evaluations require flexible and adaptive decision-making processes. Predefined KPIs make it possible to react in real time and initiate optimization measures without long decision-making processes.

Flexibility must be planned

With the concept of "planning for agility," media agencies have tried in the past to drive more flexible campaigns in the online sector. Until now, however, paid media has been dominated almost exclusively by search engine advertising. Only recently have companies begun to open up to new concepts. In particular, "always on" measures are appearing more frequently, which is reflected in the setting of budgets based on annual spread plans. A certain percentage of the total budget is thus deliberately used on the basis of real-time evaluations. Fixed periods, channels, formats, or target group segments are becoming less important and are being replaced by continuous learning and the resulting measures.

These new approaches pose challenges for customers and media agencies. Processes that were previously based on strict media plans and time-limited processes from briefing to planning to reporting no longer work. Adaptive marketing frameworks" are now being used. They serve as a process framework for nonlinear activities during a campaign and are adapted to the needs of the customer based on data analyses. To do this, companies and media agencies have to get away from previous thought patterns and assumptions and adapt to volatile conditions.

Relevant content follows behavior

One thing "always on" strategies and classic marketing have in common is that the target group is the basis for a successful campaign. While classic approaches focused on demographic, overarching characteristics and rigid behavioral patterns, modern strategies go one step further. They analyze the current moods, needs and behavior of target groups on the web. With this information, campaign content can be tailored to smaller segments. More relevance generates higher attention for the messages and increases the probability of a lead.

In summary, it can be said that there is no way around "always on. Only those who follow their consumers in their information behavior can penetrate the flood of information. To do this, you need a database that is constantly renewed. Media agencies and companies must manage this basis together in order to generate and use the right data. This requires responsible people on all sides who follow the consumer on his path and focus on him as an individual.

The author: Anja Thumbshas been responsible for digital at Mindshare Switzerland since 2016. The sociology graduate has more than 15 years of media experience and specializes in digital communications consulting and media planning. This article was previously published in Werbewoche 9/2018.