We live in uncertain times, there is no doubt about it. And uncertain times often means one thing for marketers - lower income means cuts to marketing budgets. Though we understand cutting costs may feel like a more immediate boost, your business will benefit long term by making room for at least some marketing budget. Your customers may not hang around unless you stay present and keep a good relationship with them, no matter how tight budgets are. In short, if you disappear from your customers’ mind, they will disappear from your businesses.

By the way, if you don't want to read, here's the video version of this post!

Keeping campaign always on is beneficial for many reasons. We have listed our top five reasons, and would love to hear your reason for running always on campaigns!

1. Reach users when they are interested

You never know when exactly a customer will be ready for a purchase and you want to make sure to reach them with the right message at exactly the right moment. Customers nowadays want to do their research before purchasing and expect to always have access to the information they need. Unless you are a clairvoyant, the best way to always keep top of mind is to run campaigns all the time, not limited to a specific time frame. That being said, always on campaigns can take many shapes and with many different goals in mind.

2. Collect data for later use

The most commonly used type of always-on campaign to ensure sales is retargeting, which reaches anyone who has shown interest in your product, but have not yet purchased. This is also especially interesting nowadays, with customers purchasing less. Many businesses collect leads through offering freebies and other offers, which they can then use for retargeting when things turn back to normal. By running a campaign automatically retargeting leads or other users who have shown interest, you make sure they don’t disappear and hopefully come back to your page. In terms of sales, retargeting campaigns have the highest ROI as they reach low-hanging fruits, meaning users who are close to a purchase.

3. Keep top of mind

Another great use of always-on campaigns is spreading awareness and creating engagement. Simply put, you run a campaign informing and inspiring the user to learn more about your product and can use retargeting to show campaigns with more detailed information at a later stage. This type of campaign often reaches users at an early stage of the customer journey, and is a great way to gently spark interest with the users without feeling too “pushy”. By jumping straight to a conversion campaign without first running an awareness campaign you risk the user not being ready to consider a purchase. Awareness campaigns often reach users a long time before the actual purchase, and as such you would need to work with a long term strategy, and look at the ROI in the long run.

4. Work with the algorithm, not against it

That’s the strategy talk out of the way, now to the technical aspect. You want to run always on campaigns not only for the strategy mentioned above, but also because you will actually be rewarded by social media platforms for consistently running campaigns. Facebook, Google and all other digital marketing platforms need to feed data into their highly advanced algorithms to help you achieve the best results. By running short campaigns, you’re effectively starving the system of data until you all of a sudden need the system to work perfectly on a very short notice. This often leads to inferior, more expensive results as the system didn’t have enough time and data to make good predictions about your potential customers. If you regularly feed the system data through running campaigns, the algorithm will be much more prepared to predict who your best customers are, how to find the cheapest prices for you and where your highest potential for sales lie. Chances are, if you feel a campaign has not achieved the results you wanted, simply feeding the system more data may have been enough to improve data.

5. Work steadily, not in bursts

The social media landscape is rapidly changing and requires frequent changes to strategy, as many marketers have painfully experienced. One of the main benefits of digital marketing is the sheer volume of data you have access to, but this data needs to be up to date. Recent data allows you to analyse what may or may not have worked in previous campaigns, and discover what you should do more, or less, of. If you run sporadic campaigns with long time gaps in between, you will not be able use the data to compare and contrast in the same way due to the changing nature of social media. For instance, the campaign you ran a year ago and worked well may provide terrible results if ran again this year. You want to always have recent data in order to make the best decisions. Always on campaigns allow for that fresh pool of data that you can benefit from in your decision making.

As you can see, keeping marketing campaigns always on has many benefits, both in terms of strategy and customer satisfaction, as well as your ad results and ROI. Remember that even small marketing budgets can go a long way on Facebook and Google, as long as you make sure you reach the right people with the right messaging.

Thanks for reading!