Most marketing campaigns are like sprints, but building a brand is a marathon-level endeavor.
You can run a slew of ads to support a new product launch, but it’s over in a matter of months. You can’t afford to go dark on your target audience until the next campaign.
Brands like Nike and Pepsi make sure they keep showing up throughout the year through sponsorships, celebrity partnerships, and pop-up activations. This increases and maintains elements like brand awareness and affinity. It’s one of the reasons those brands are household names.
Always-on marketing requires both the ability to see branding opportunities and the agility to act on them. The technology to support it should be just as adaptable, but it’s easy to approach buying tools and platforms like you’re planning a one-off or seasonal campaign.
That short-term thinking can lead to vendor lock-in, limiting what your tech stack can do later on. Better to approach it like an always-on campaign that makes you ready for anything.
Why always-on thinking beats in-the-moment decision-making
An always-on mindset works equally well for marketing and tech buying because it blends consistency with flexibility.
Look at a brand like Salesforce as an example. It doesn’t just run short-term campaigns promoting its core CRM solution. It consistently publishes multiple blog posts a day that answer its target audience’s questions about sales, marketing, and service.
Salesforce does even more to educate its audience by offering a free training platform called Trailhead, and when it makes key announcements at its flagship Dreamforce conference, it keeps the momentum going with a World Tour series of localized events. This allows the company to highlight new product launches while also offering relevant content that aligns with emerging trends and issues.
Contrast that with how a lot of tech stacks get built:
- The business recognizes the need to automate a critical process.
- A proprietary solution is selected, and you sign a multi-year contract.
- Implementation seemingly takes forever.
- You realize you need additional capabilities, but your solution doesn’t support them.
- You wait until the contract renews and start looking all over again.
This gets in the way of many common digital marketing objectives. According to WordPress VIP’s Future of the Web report, 30% of organizations are prioritizing AI search, and 48% are worried about losing control over the way AI answer engines cite their content. A closed platform designed and purchased before generative AI emerged won’t help you increase visibility and conversions.
In-the-moment decision-making is understandable because no one can know with certainty what your future technology needs are.
Just as the world’s smartest brands create marketing assets that they can reuse and repurpose to cover the full customer journey, though, you can choose technology that creates a foundation for long-term success.
Investing in open source platforms keeps your tech stack always-on and prepared for changes in how enterprise content needs to be created, managed, and optimized for AI.
What makes open source an always-on infrastructure choice?
Choosing an open source platform is a solid business decision for any organization that’s interested in being able to experiment with new tools and digital channels, access a global ecosystem of developers, and reduce its dependency on a single vendor.
This becomes critical when you consider how your owned digital assets enable you to continuously market yourself to customers and prospects. Right now, just 17% of those surveyed in the Future of Web report said they will put their website investments first next year, compared with 32% who will prioritize social media.
Like a proprietary platform, though, social media services are fundamentally walled gardens, where you’re renting an audience rather than developing your own.
Open source keeps you always on because it’s:
- Modular: A successful brand creates a resource library of evergreen assets they can use for always-on marketing, like case studies, reports, logos, and explainer videos. An open source CMS is similar in that you can swap in modules to handle areas like marketing automation or social listening without having to rebuild your website from scratch.
- Continuous: Proprietary platforms are developed based on a roadmap determined by your vendor, and the time spent waiting for new features and capabilities is like the void between short-term product launch campaigns. Advancements in open source come via an army of solution providers and developers. Your CMS evolves based on what you need and will use, vs. what a vendor deigns to offer.
- Adaptable: A fast-food brand might learn that many of its target customers watch women’s basketball and decide to sponsor a team. You should be able to meet your audience just as quickly and easily when new digital channels become popular. An open source CMS with hybrid headless architectural options gives you room to maneuver and have your content show up wherever your customers go.
How Mecum Auctions achieved the always-on effect
If you’ve ever attended a car auction or watched one online, you’ll know it creates a special atmosphere of excitement and urgency. Mecum Auctions is a leader in that space, but its expertise goes beyond running auctions. It saw itself as an experienced company that needed a digital presence to keep car buyers continually engaged.
Moving to WordPress VIP achieved that. Instead of a disjointed digital experience that forced them to rely heavily on developers, open source enabled Mecum Auctions to launch new content in minutes. WordPress VIP’s headless architecture, meanwhile, lets the company scale content operations more agilely.
Best of all, choosing WordPress VIP enabled Mecum Auctions to launch MyMecum, a digital experience where its audience can log in to access personalized content and exclusive perks, as well as a look back at their past auction history between events.
How can marketers address security concerns about open source architecture?
Open source does not equal vulnerable, especially when it comes from a company like WordPress VIP, which provides enterprise hardening for organizations operating in regulated or strictly governed environments.
If cybersecurity concerns pose a potential blocker, explain that open source is transparent and auditable, making it faster and easier to investigate issues.
Next, point to the many large public and private sector organizations that have been running on open source solutions like WordPress VIP for years.
Finally, share free resources to better understand enterprise WordPress security, such as guides, videos, case studies, and more.
The impact of AI on always-on marketing requirements
AI has made it even clearer why organizations should invest in open source vs. proprietary technologies.
As LLMs seek the best content to fuel answer engines, brands need to continually update their marketing assets with up-to-date insights and unique data. What it takes to keep marketing in always-on mode will continue to evolve quickly. Vendor lock-in only slows you down.
This also explains why platform decisions like a CMS can’t be left to IT departments alone. Marketing leaders need to partner with CIOs and their teams to ensure they can easily adopt and change toolsets, own their data, quickly move into new channels, and pay only for what they’re actually using.
A launch campaign is here today and gone tomorrow. Building a brand means having a tech stack that will take you through tomorrow and beyond.
