Several years ago, a local business owner shared his experience of running marketing campaigns. It wasn’t good.
As a small business owner, he ran content marketing campaigns when things were quiet.
These campaigns generated leads and new clients, and he worked his socks off to provide a fantastic service.
While providing that service, he took his foot off the marketing gas peddle. Customer service (rightly) came first.
And then, once he did the work, he stared into the barren wasteland of an empty prospect list and resumed a new marketing campaign.
This ‘feast and famine’ marketing is a common experience for small business owners where time and other constraints create a choice between client work and marketing activity.
Here at Bear Content, we advocate an always-on content marketing strategy.
Instead of throwing everything at a short-term campaign and then ‘going dark’ to handle the subsequent client work, it’s essential to keep marketing activity ticking over at all times.
Always-on content marketing means delivering consistent audience engagement and messaging.
By ensuring your marketing is always on, you send a clear signal to your prospective clients that you are open, available and ready to do business.
Always on marketing allows you to treat each piece of content as a test. You quickly gain confirmation about what works and what you could do differently.
Each time you publish fresh content, you learn lessons from prior experience and improve the results.
An always-on approach to content marketing also allows you to respond quickly to trends, creating content designed to complement or supplement breaking news relevant to your business.
While dropping the traditional notion of campaigns, an always-on approach still allows you to introduce themes and seasonality to your content marketing calendar.
It’s about finding a sustainable level of marketing activity that you can keep up for the long-term without sacrificing the time you need to service customers.
One effective way to ensure sustainability with an always-on content marketing strategy is to nominate days of the week to different marketing activities.
For example, Monday could be the day you publish a blog post and send your customers an email newsletter.
On Wednesdays, you could publish a short video. And, on Fridays, you press publish on your podcast episode.
With a three-day content marketing calendar like this, you can use the other days of each week to share micro-content on your social media channels, repurposed from the pillar content published on those main days.
By keeping marketing activity ticking over at all times, you’ll be able to create an always-on content marketing strategy that delivers consistent audience engagement and messaging.
If you want to know how to activate this type of campaign for your business, then get in touch!
With our help, we can provide the expertise needed to create a compelling content marketing campaign, ready to implement across your website and social media channels.
