Nurture’s got a bad name, maybe it’s time to let it go. “Nurture” has become synonymous with “email” and email has become a byword for “spam.” To avoid those connotations, we now call it an “always on” campaign.

That’s a solid start. It gets people thinking beyond the inbox, to display ads, sales plays, partnerships, and podcasts. But we can do even better. Because even marketers who rightly think of their nurtures as aggressively multi-channel still think of nurtures as built by a single team—them.

In this article, let’s revisit that idea.

Always on means “multi” everything

I believe the ideal always on campaign is aggressively multi-channel. You have to tell people seven times in seven ways and I would add on to that—also tell them in seven modalities where your ads fit a campaign coherent enough that either it’s a bus stop sign or a display ad, people know it’s you. 

That’s a high bar for your branding and design, but it is necessary in today’s media environment. It’s a consumer example, but see the spread of Oatly ads below. They’re are unmistakably related.

Source: Contagious. 

Being aggressively multi-channel means using every channel at your disposal to reach folks. It’s a well-coordinated conversation that flits across channels to offer genuine help, education, or inspiration in the context of the buyer’s “job to be done.” 

And if you’ve read our article about making always on campaigns feel friendly to buyers, you’ll know there are many dimensions to this—orchestration, measurement, data, messaging, internal alignment, and general marketing sophistication. 

Which is why it’s unrealistic to think it’ll all be done by just your team.

Better call MOps

I believe you should invite your MOps team into every marketing planning conversation. So much of marketing is technology and we’ve had a bigger software budget than IT for nearly half a decade now. Technology is integral to the equation so MOps should be central to the conversation. 

Technology is integral to the equation so MOps should be central to the conversation.

Because also, technology hasn’t helped us bridge silos the way we were promised early in the marketing automation revolution. Though that has as much to do with how those apps were set up as the features they offer—the lead/contact and contact/account conflicts so central to those database structures can be overcome—but it takes some really smart tech people and a whole lot of planning. 

It also means involving every team affected by these decisions—accounts, sales, success, comms, and so on.

Here are some questions to bring to that conversation: 

1. ‍What are all the ways we can “listen” to our buyers?  Primary sources are best. Be critical of your tertiary sources like signals; they can supplement, but they are not themselves news.
2. ‍What are all the ways we can reach our buyers? List them all out with their pros and cons, abilities and limitations. 
3. ‍What are our buyers’ primary “jobs to be done” at each stage of the funnel?And importantly, the questions they ask. Don’t presume—go into recorded prospect calls, customer calls, and anywhere people get to share their objections, and work from a verbatim base of actual quotes.
4. ‍How can we listen/reply intelligently at each stage? Put it all together. For every question/issue/phase change, have a response. 
5. ‍Work through how to implement that in your current systems If you’ve involved MOps heavily up until now, and they fully understand your intent, you have what you need to start constructing an always on campaign that achieves its multi-channel intent and feels good to your buyer. 

“Nurture” had a bad name—and comes with bad habits

In this age marketers cannot be “going it alone” when planning campaigns. They can’t be relying only on email, and they can’t be relying only on themselves just because MOps and other teams seem busy. 

If you want to produce campaigns that listen across channels and feel intelligent and intriguing to buyers, it has to be “multi” all the way down—multi-channel and multi-team. 

Curious how to actually implement that? You may enjoy our latest guide to building always on campaigns.