The difference between responsive & reactive marketing

By Curtis Kitchen

Remember when marketing was just simple “marketing”? One person on your staff might have been the catch-all “marketing person” – the one who handles all public relations, marketing, communications and sometimes even photography and IT!

Wait … that’s what you still have?

You aren't alone, but it is absolutely necessary that you, your marketing person or small staff understands the many niches of marketing in the current climate. That’s not an easy task. It might be content marketing, or direct marketing, or “traditional” marketing, or knowing how to market in a business-to-business setting versus business-to-consumer. While all of those are “marketing,” each is unique in its specific benefits and tool sets.

It is easy to get confused or lost in the jargon as many marketers do when it comes to two of the most-often misused terms I hear – responsive marketing and reactive marketing. They sound pretty much the same, don’t they?

They aren’t.

What does "responsive marketing" mean?

Responsive marketing is making your overall design and strategy flexible to a multi-outlet environment – your website loading “correctly” on the many different screen sizes and platforms, for example.

You need your gorgeous site and its many menus to be able to “respond” automatically and efficiently to smart phones, tablets, watches, and anything else with a unique display size. In fact, it isn’t a stretch to say that this – just behind knowing how to run a great auction – might be the single most important marketing concept for auction professionals to learn and master (or find staff who can) as smart technologies continue to emerge. Rigid concepts and designs incapable of bending to stay in line with climate change is a recipe for disaster.

Think about the long list of functions and pieces to your auction company website: lot lists and images, auction calendars, online bidding platforms, and a whole host of other critical functions. Think about how important it is to a potential client or bidder who tries accessing your unresponsive site through a mobile device. Pictures don’t line up right. Text is spread all over the screen. Or, worst, folks are left to try and scroll side-to-side on a small screen. Now, think of them moving on to another site that “looks right” on their device.

In today’s world, yes, responsive marketing is crucial.

What does “reactive marketing” mean?

In a boiled-down definition, reactive marketing is exactly what it sounds like: a marketing reaction to clients’ and consumers’ wants.

Let’s say a topic is trending on social media, and you (or your marketing team) decide to build a nifty ad that incorporates that trendy topic’s conversation into a message for your business. It might be a real-time (instant) reply on social media, or it can be a week-long campaign. Your marketing “reacted” to the current climate.

When done correctly, the long-term benefit from an immediate action can be huge. Oreo, Mini and Tide are all brands that have effectively jumped on events as they happened and made favorable, memorable instant campaigns work for them.

How to use both effectively

While the names “responsive” and “reactive” suggest both strategies are built on the idea of spontaneity, and thus should be executed as such, that is hardly correct.

The secret to both strategies: planning. Lots of planning.

Having a site be able to react to any screen without a hiccup means a developer planned and programmed for it. Having a person or team stay on top of social media conversations and react optimally means they were put in place well before then and trained to react accordingly when a situation called for it.

It might seem lucky when a brand hits on a reactive mark, but it reminds me of a favorite saying: Luck is the result of skill meeting opportunity.

So, in short, prepare now. Take the steps necessary for your site and marketing strategies to be responsive to a changing environment. Take the steps necessary for your brand to be at the ready for when a reactive situation presents itself.

Then, blend it all together so that your responsive platform is capable of serving your business to a curious public as they find your site through any and all devices after getting hooked by your on-the-mark reactive marketing.