Reactive marketing… What a beast! Some marketing experts love it, some hate it, and some think it’s an occasionally-necessary mess. On one hand, it can do wonders, creating viral sensations; on the other, it can be like throwing resources into a bottomless pit, leading to chaos and mayhem that ultimately negatively impacts your sales.
It’s essential to understand reactive marketing if you are going to make enough sense of it that it can become a reasonable tool that fits neatly into your overall marketing strategy.
What is Reactive Marketing?
Reactive marketing is responding quickly to a situation to draw a promotional opportunity from it. It is opposed to proactive marketing, where each move is carefully planned and scripted.
Reactive marketing can be in response to an external event:
- Related news
- An upcoming event
- Spotting fast-moving trends
Or it can be an internet situation to do with your business:
- A new product performs unexpectedly
- Sudden staff changes
- A desperate panic because you need more leads!
Or… it can be waiting until you’ve got no leads in your pipeline and panic marketing to generate some revenue!
The Good Side of Reactive Marketing
There is some good – if you are able to take proper advantage.
Reactive marketing is fast. It shows you and your business to be current and topical – aware of changes in your sector, it aligns your brand with cultural trends and it’s a great rapport builder, often being more casual and entwined with humour than other formal marketing.
There’s a lot to be gained from reactive marketing, especially if your target demographic is young at its core, with teenagers and young adults likely to be more swayed with an immediate, short-term, and up-to-date message.
The Bad Side of Reactive Marketing
True reactive marketing is unplanned. It’s seizing an opportunity that has arisen, and in order to do so, you have to take time away from other things. Often, reactive marketing means displacing any current plans to facilitate it, making it disruptive and chaotic.
It’s easy to miss, and miss badly. Without enough time to properly consider and check your responses, you may inadvertently say something that damages your business rather than enhancing it. Going viral when you get it right is a great thing; going viral when you accidentally offend or upset someone is quite, quite different.
In a modern world of never-forgotten statements and cancel culture, rapid-fire reactive marketing that goes wrong can have significant long-term consequences.
It’s difficult to measure. Reactive marketing can spread and get some impressive statistics in terms of views, but are the right people seeing your message or is it just hits for hits’ sake? Conversion rates are often very low.
And it’s inconsistent. You find yourself throwing out promotional messages at odd times without proper follow up or scheduling conformity, which does your long-term outlook little good.
Ultimately, if you only market when your leads have dried up, you wait for them to come to fruition and then have to stop marketing to deal with them. It’s a panic-driven stressful cycle that will renew again and again.
The Ugly Face of Reactive Marketing
The inconsistent, under-curated side of reactive marketing means people simply don’t connect to your brand. Lacking a well-considered target, reactive marketing may well get people to consider a product or service, but they have no real connection or understanding of who you are.
In many cases, reactive marketing can even serve to promote your rivals!
It is more likely that reactive marketing feeds your ego more than your business, getting you an illusory image of your message spreading through the world, but with no real return. It looks great, it can feel fantastic, but it doesn’t really lead to sales.
The inconsistent messaging is more likely to be ignored and may even be harmful, demonstrating a poor quality of marketing that is quickly associated with a poor quality of product or service.
Getting it Right - Blending Proactive and Reactive Marketing
Getting the good out of reactive marketing without falling to the pitfalls of the bad or suffering the ugly, is about balance – it’s about getting the mix of proactive and reactive marketing just so.
The trick is to cheat – make your marketing look reactive when really it’s proactive. Plan time in your marketing team calendar to look at reactive opportunities and properly market to them – don’t react to the morning’s news like a panicked chicken, throwing other plans aside, but put aside the regular time to look at current trends and have rapid marketing ready.
In a small way, it’s like when the newspapers plan for an election result. They often have multiple articles ready so that when the final victory news is in, they can publish a detailed report immediately, no matter who was successfully elected. While developing multiple marketing messages when many won’t be used is a little too time-consuming, having the bare bones of adaptable skeleton ideas ready to go can help your reactive marketing considerably.
Always consider:
- Who you want to target
- What you want to say
- How it is best said and presented
And check what you are saying is really appropriate and on-brand multiple times before you send it out there!
It is important not to lean heavily on your reactive marketing – it should come from a strong grounding of proactive marketing. Reactive marketing suffers from many dry spots during a year, and if that’s your core plan, you’ll continually end up scraping the barrel bottom for something to write about and promote.
In the long term, plan ahead for at least a year, but give yourself checkpoints every 3 months. At those times, look at the current trends and directions your business sector is taking and be flexible, moving with them as is appropriate. This, combined with a little regular time devoted to reactionary promotions, will get you all the benefits of reactive marketing with far fewer downsides.
Ultimately, proactive marketing is the only strategy that delivers results – it takes consistency and habit to build relationships, but a little pseudo-reactive marketing in there definitely has its advantages.
If you want to know more about how to integrate some reactive marketing benefits into your current marketing strategy, or how to better plan and develop a robust, successful, proactive marketing plan, reach out today.
