What is an always-on marketing strategy?

Always-on marketing is a strategy that involves continuous marketing activities. Instead of your seasonal or short-term campaigns, you run an ongoing campaign. With StackAdapt, that can mean maintaining consistent presence across programmatic channels while you layer in seasonal or launch-based bursts.  

This approach to marketing gives your brand a continuous presence online, which can bring many benefits. It strengthens the relationship with your existing customers, engages potential customers, and increases overall brand awareness, recall, and loyalty.

Nielsen’s research shows that brand recall is the biggest driver of lift in emerging media, accounting for 38.7% of brand lift, which makes a strong case for keeping your brand in market year-round.

Let’s unpack the difference between always-on marketing and campaign-based marketing, when to use always-on marketing, its benefits, and some key strategies for always-on marketing. 

What is an always-on marketing strategy?

Always-on marketing is when your marketing efforts are up and running every day, year-round. It means marketing activities are continuous, rather than being tied to seasons, events, or specific campaigns. 

Always-on marketing campaigns leverage evergreen content that can be run on social media, email, and through programmatic advertising.

What’s the difference between always-on vs. campaign-based marketing?

Always-on marketing campaigns are set up to run continuously throughout the whole year. 

This type of marketing leverages evergreen content to drive brand awareness through continued exposure. 

Campaign-based marketing doesn’t run continuously. This approach to marketing sets parameters that make a campaign short term, or a one-off. Campaign-based marketing has a start and end date.

Campaign-based marketing is a good fit for supporting a specific upcoming event, new product release, or seasonal efforts like holiday or back to school campaigns. For example, a fashion retailer running a campaign to support an upcoming summer collection of clothing. 

Benefits of always-on marketing campaigns

Always-on marketing campaigns can lift brand awareness, increase engagement, and lead to continuous interactions with your target audience. Let’s unpack four benefits of always-on marketing in more detail:

1. Taps into the mere exposure effect

The “mere exposure effect” is a phenomenon popularized by Robert Zajonc’s 1968 study. The study found that people tend to have a more favorable view of things they’re familiar with, which includes things they’ve been repeatedly exposed to. 

For instance, Google found that users who watch ads for more than three seconds experience higher brand awareness, ad recall, and consideration.

For brands, this means that even when their ads are noticed briefly, they’ll still get value out of being noticed at all. Your audience will have repeated exposure to your ads, which ultimately builds a positive impression of the brand. 

2. Nurtures customers for long-term loyalty

Repeated exposure to your ads does more than just result in a favorable view of a brand. It keeps your brand top of mind, helping to maintain the connection your customers have with your brand or offering. 

When your customers feel connected to your brand, they’re more likely to stay loyal to your offering over the long term. With an always-on strategy, you’re able to reinforce your brand message and values, which ultimately drives growth and long-term loyalty. 

3. Reaches users throughout the funnel

An always-on marketing campaign enables you to reach customers holistically with a full-funnel strategy. This means you’re able to reach customers regardless of where they are in their customer journey.

An always-on strategy can cover the entire funnel, from the top, also known as the awareness stage, where users are just beginning to discover your brand, to the bottom, also known as the conversion stage, where users are ready to buy or have already purchased your product.

4. Drives engagement with content

When you’re communicating with your target audience on a more frequent basis, you’ll drive more users to your content. By running your programmatic campaigns year round, you’ll increase traffic to your website and other content. 

An always-on marketing strategy will help position your brand as a leader in your industry. Increased traffic to your content will also help build your website’s authority in Google’s search results. 

Strategies for a successful always-on campaign 

Ready to launch an always-on marketing campaign that drives results? Here are three key strategies to get you started: 

1. Run your campaign on multiple channels

When you run your always-on marketing campaign with programmatic, you’re able to deliver the campaign on multiple channels.

Running your campaign across channels like display, audio, in-game, digital out-of-home, connected TV (CTV), direct mail, and ChatGPT allows you to reach your audience wherever they are, whether they’re scrolling on their phone, listening to a podcast, walking through an airport, or hanging out at home. 

2. Develop strong ad creative and copy

Ensure the messaging of your ad creative is always engaging and relevant to avoid ad fatigue. For always-on campaigns, you’ll want to continuously test and optimize your creatives and ad copy. It’s recommended to refresh creatives approximately every eight weeks to ensure they continue to capture attention. 

When you run an always-on programmatic campaign, you have access to features that allow you to test your ad creatives and copy effectively.

You can mix A/B testing and brand lift studies into your strategy to see exactly what’s driving engagement and identify opportunities to pivot. This allows you to optimize performance based on what works best for your always-on campaign. 

3. Dynamically retarget users

Dynamic retargeting is the perfect strategy for combining your always-on campaign with your seasonal marketing efforts. When the right time of the year rolls around, start retargeting users who have seen or engaged with your always-on campaign. Retargeting them at the right moment will help drive conversions when your audience is most receptive.  

Get started with always-on marketing

Always-on digital marketing isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it strategy. After implementing always-on marketing, analyze the data you’re collecting and leverage it to optimize your strategy, including ad creative and messaging. For the best results, you’ll need to continually test, analyze, and optimize.

Request a demo to learn more about running always-on marketing with StackAdapt.

Always-on digital marketing FAQs