FEW RETAIL STORES are as challenging to market as jewelry stores. We sell a product that nobody needs, with largely unpredictable demand, to an infrequent buyer, for whom both the product and the purchasing experience can be intimidating. Jewelry stores must find a way to be ever-present in the buyer’s awareness so they remember you when they are ready to buy.
Always-on-marketing (AOM) is the name for continuous marketing strategies designed to maintain constant awareness and deep engagement with a target audience. AOM takes a long-term approach rather than short-term bursts of marketing activity. Perhaps the easiest way to understand it is to contrast AOM with campaign marketing, which is short-term and intensive. It focuses on specific events, seasons, or products, whereas AOM is about relationships.
While both AOM and campaign marketing have their own complexities, planning and launching promotions make it easier to measure the success of campaigns, and you don’t have to maintain consistency over time as you do with AOM.
Campaigns certainly have a role to play, but the bread-and-butter of jewelry stores is engagement rings and sentimental gifts, and campaigns don’t work as well as AOM for staying top-of-mind with would-be engagement ring, anniversary, and birthday buyers.
You’re probably already doing some elements of AOM. Paid search, SEO and social media strategies are the most common forms. Other AOM strategies include thought leadership, content marketing, email marketing, customer relationship marketing, and community-building.
Thought leadership is the marketing strategy of positioning yourself or your brand as a trusted authority and expert in your field. The goal is to establish credibility, build trust, and differentiate from your competitors, so you are the one people remember when it’s time to buy.
Content marketing includes sharing relevant, consistent content through many forms, like blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, social media posts, infographics, and events. The aim is to provide information, explore problems and solutions, and build relationships.
Email marketing in an AOM strategy is less promotional, more communicative than campaign emails. AOM emails feel more personal, written like one-to-one communications. The best AOM marketers have a constant flow of conversational emails scheduled and automated.
Together, email and social media should function as the connective tissue of the store-customer relationship, sharing details about what happens in the store and celebrating customer, employee, and community-member milestones.
AOM cannot be done on an ad hoc basis. These strategies require long-term planning, writers, designers, and a full-featured CRM system to schedule, automate, and analyze every effort. Your message must be delivered every day, multiple times per day.
Adopting an AOM approach has a learning curve. But the more you focus on nurturing your customer base, the more likely prospective jewelry buyers will be to remember you when they’re in the market for jewelry.