What does it mean for brands to be "Always on"

Brands are rightly investing heavily into their owned and earned media channels – websites, apps, social and branded content, promotions, eDMs, PR etc. The collection of actionable data from each of these is important and, I suggest, valuable enough to be an "always on" to enable performance tracking and paid media effectiveness. Analytics are great, as are nice looking dashboards – what boards and shareholders want to see though is how this investment into owned and earned has shifted business success metrics including brand uplift, new customers acquired and greater lifetime value or share of wallet.

Here are five pointers to ensure an "always on" data strategy connects your owned and earned investment with paid media ROI:

1. Your website and social assets are 'always on' – so start collecting data from them, always. The tools you use to collect data should not only look at inbound traffic to your site, or clicks on search links. They should give you a full agnostic view of all the ways consumers engage with and share your content. Often the richest form of intent and interest data is sharing data…if consumers care they share! 

2. Ensure the data you collect is yours, and yours only. Be wary of data capture tools that are offered for "free" as this often means your data is being sold to third parties. Ensure that whatever is collected from your owned media assets is kept secure and can only be used by you. It will mean there is a different value exchange with the tech vendor or you may need to pay for the tools, but this is better than losing control of your first party data. 

3. Don’t expect "viral", learn and measure your virality. Stop paying to create and distribute content that isn't resonating. Content very rarely magically goes 'viral' but always on data can be learning about content "virality" for you in real time which informs your content distribution strategy. This ensures that you are amplifying the most powerful content based on what you observe consumers are doing with it.

4. Stop thinking social = social networks: Our most recent study found that in Southeast Asia the majority - over 75% - of all social sharing is actually occurring via "dark social". This is where consumers copy and paste links or content into emails or instant messenger services, and selectively share with their friends, family and colleagues - rather than posting onto public social networks. For each dark social share, the content and the people it’s being shared with are selected for a very specific reason. This data is incredibly powerful, especially when merged with real time media buying capabilities.

5. Activate your data to increase paid media effectiveness: The world of programmatic buying brings with it an ability to collect, understand and act on data in near real time – so ensure that the data you collect is "actionable" – i.e. that you’re collecting it in a platform that can both make sense of it, and then use these real-time insights to inform highly targeted paid media.

When we talk about using owned and earned channels to fuel paid media effectiveness – effective looks like having the ability - in an agnostic manner - to gather, protect and activate all of your data across the open Web and mobile. The technology is well and truly here to support this and in 2016 we’ll see brands connecting the dots.

"Always on" means always learning, pivoting fast, real-time insights and knowing at all times what’s happening with your investment into owned, earned and paid channels.

The writer is Patrick Darcy, commercial director APAC for RadiumOne.

RadiumOne was one of the Knowledge Partner at the recently held Digital Marketing Indonesia. Read more about the conference here.