What is ‘always-on’ in marketing?
Relationships with customers and shoppers
Effective for data and understanding behaviours
Flexibility, convenience, and long-term benefits
Integrating always-on into your promotions
Always-on marketing is a strategy that utilises continuous marketing activities rather than being limited to a particular time frame or period like in campaigns.
The idea is that marketing efforts are a continually live addition to a brand’s marketing stack, it opens the opportunity for a brand to receive continual exposure at any point in time that the always-on marketing strategy is live.
Whereas always-on marketing campaigns run year-round; campaign-based marketing accounts for shorter periods.
Campaign marketing is time-bound and works best to support seasonal events and campaigns, product releases, or generally, for ‘occasions’ rather than as general support via marketing for a brand due to its nature of short bursts of marketing efforts.
This type of marketing is often seen as more traditional and incorporates a wider medium and range of marketing methods such as print and OOH. However, campaign-based marketing will still incorporate digital, for example, paid media.
With always-on, as the name suggests, the marketing is constant and continually live. Some popular examples include PPC and SEO marketing, content-based marketing, organic social media, and more. Whilst there is overlap with campaign-based marketing, the key difference is that always-on efforts focus more on building awareness than other metrics or conversions.
Looking into specifically prize promotions, an always-on platform is usually integrated as a promotional website or microsite. As the name suggests, this microsite is usually ‘always live’ with some sort of promotion including a prize draw, instant win, or other promotional mechanic to keep audiences engaged with the brand’s promotional and product offerings.
There are many reasons why brands do so. We’ve seen many successful case studies over the years of brands that successfully integrate and run an always-on system within their promotional and shopper activation strategy.
Being visible and active for an extended period has its benefits, namely, being available to customers to engage with, 24/7, opens the possibility of long-term engagement from consumers, bringing the brands front to mind, through repeated engagements.
Moreover, the always-on promotions tap into and utilise the ‘Mere Exposure Effect’, wherein people favour and prefer things they’re familiar with and by extension, things they’ve repeatedly been exposed to.
Utilising an always-on strategy encourages trust and familiarity with customers. It nurtures those relationships over the entire course of a customer life cycle - opening the possibility for long-term loyalty and again, engagement.
Always-on promotional microsites and websites are an excellent way to gather data to better understand consumers.
With the current phase-out of third-party cookies, first-party data has become immensely useful and popular - it provides a more accurate and precise look into a brand’s audience.
Hosting promotions has always been a great way to gather first-party data to understand audiences. Hosting promotions digitally on a microsite or promotional website separate from the brand’s main showcase page means that the data is less likely to be influenced by the traffic on the main website, providing more accurate and clear insights into customers and the user journeys they take within a promotion.
Having an always-on microsite also allows marketers to draw more accurate conclusions the more data there is, and allows brands to evaluate promotions on a comparative basis.
The microsite becomes a long-term avenue to gather data and insights on consumers and participants, allowing for a better understanding of their behaviour and preferences to create better-targeted marketing efforts that will resonate with audiences.
Having an always-on promotional strategy and an always-on microsite means that tight turnaround can be met due to the high reusability of the designs for digital, pre-onboarded brand guidelines, and clearance from info security and legal. The extensive designing and redesigning involved with creating a campaign is lessened due to there being an existing outline.
Moreover, creating an always-on microsite, means that promotional activities and data are centralised, making it far easier to host multiple promotions simultaneously.
Making your promotional strategy, ‘always-on’ opens the brand to improving discoverability and brand visibility. This is a possibility because promotional websites are given more time and chances to improve SEO and build search authority due to their always-on nature.
A great example of an always-on promotional microsite is Sony’s Xperia Rewards microsite. While there isn’t always a live promotion, the website is always live at xperiarewards.co.uk and frequently sees new prize promotions added to it to reward new and loyal customers
.
Maintaining the momentum and engagement of an always-on marketing strategy can be difficult, brands can encourage revisits and incentivise a continual engagement with always-on promotions - but even so, the process can be repetitive which may lead to an eventual ‘drop-off’ point where users stop engaging.
Other than paying attention and accommodating your audience’s wants, there are several ways to prevent this and to keep an always-on promotion engaging and ‘fresh’.
A simple, tried and true way is to change and offer new prizes - constantly offering the same thing can work, many appreciate the consistency however, having a variety of prizes may open up your brand to new audiences and participants.
Especially for always-on promotions, having a strong and appealing prize pool encourages entry - changing them out every so often will also give incentive for entrants to return and enter the promotion again.
For example, Ivy’s Reserve has had a promotion on its website that operates on an always-on basis since 2023. The promotion, handled by Promotions Interactive and Prize Professionals, has a new prize pool every month - providing prizes that are closely related to the branding, but within various categories. For example, in January 2025, Ivy’s Reserve offered a bundle from Somerset Toiletry Co. And in December 2024, there were prizes from Somerset Spirits Co., both brands that share its rustic and elegant visuals as well as origins in Somerset.
Brands can gamify promotions with animations or small interactivity engagement, they can also integrate short and quick mini-games for the users to play as a condition to entering the promotion, this is especially good if the gamification directly relates to your brand since it will also help with recalling particular brands.
Continuing from the earlier example with Ivy’s Reserve, their monthly Prize draw includes a ‘higher-lower’ card game which allows entrants 3 attempts to win to successfully enter the promotions that month by winning a game. Participants can try again the next day, incentivising audiences to return to make another attempt to increase their odds of winning.
Another way to retain engagement is by creating and offering new content - provide your customers with value content, and they will feel more willing to engage in return. See it as an opportunity to advocate for the brand by creating valuable or engaging content for customers.
A great example of a brand that does this for its always-on efforts is Gressingham Duck’s Supper Club newsletter. Whilst their newsletter does often give subscribers brand promotions, they also include various other bits of content that directly target their audience, particularly home chefs with recipes and inspirations.
The easiest to manage an always-on promotion is by hosting the promotions consistently on the same page or promotional website. Some brands like to separate promotions from their main website by opening a microsite at a different URL to keep it distinct from the primary website where there may be additional customer functionalities like shopping or booking forms.
For technical elements, you can hire agencies to help you run the promotions, to handle the development and rollout. Alternatively, if your brand is looking for more control and independence from agencies, use a promotional platform such as PromoNow to build the forms and visuals; search for collaborators; and keep track of multiple promotions that are running on the dashboard all in-house. Using a platform brings control back to your brand and is an addition to support your team.
To find out how your brand can build an always-on platform and run successful promotions with an end-to-end platform. Speak to one of our experts at no cost. Consider using the PromoNow platform. Speak with a platform consultant at +44 (0)20 380 555 38 or email [email protected] to learn more.
PromoNow is a managed end-to-end cloud platform empowering brand owners with rapid, scalable and secure solutions for any promotional activation.
