Multi-channel marketing: why it’s crucial for your business

If you’re running a big business, multi channel marketing is an absolute must. In fact, it’s the only way to participate in marketing that makes sense. Today’s customers have a ton of channels at their disposal, and they decide which ones they prefer and like.

Simply put, if you’re leaving any channels out, you’re leaving out the customers who prefer those channels over others. And it isn’t just about preferences. Different channels are better at tapping into different parts of the customer journey.

Adopting multi-channel marketing is about adopting a different mindset. Your entire philosophy becomes about “molding yourself” to the way your future customer discovers your values and how they make those decisions that matter. These decisions include setting up a call with your sales team, inquiring about your services or purchasing one of your services outright. 

More specifically, multi-channel marketing is a strategy

While changing your marketing philosophy is a prerequisite, “doing multi-channel marketing” is a bit more specific. To “implement multi-channel marketing”, you and your marketing team should sit down and craft a unified strategy that cuts across different channels.

Let’s explain this part a bit more. You’re not trying to “do marketing on every type of channel”. Don’t view this as having separate marketing campaigns. What you have is “a campaign” which goes through different channels. It works through and cuts across different channels to achieve a single unified goal and create a single unified experience.

Top benefits of multi channel marketing

Increased awareness about your brand

When you are present on multiple channels, customers become better trained at recognizing your brand. Among other things, they will find it easier to engage with you. It also means that when they need a service just like yours, they’re more likely to think about you.

It often takes multiple interactions to build trust with customers. With multi-channel marketing, you are creating different pathways of communication with your audience. This increases the trust consumers have for your brand.

Secure higher revenues

Since you’re operating across multiple channels, customers can purchase your products or services more easily. That will translate into higher profits for your company and an opportunity to grow your business.

Access to valuable customer data

With multi-channel marketing, you can track the preferences of your existing customers and the habits of potential customers. Then, you will be able to further personalize the experience of both groups of customers when they interact with your brand.

You can tweak your messaging across multiple channels, and see which messages work best for each target group of customers.

How to implement an effective multi channel marketing campaign

Remember, when you’re creating a multi-channel campaign, you’re thinking about “having a well-rounded campaign”. You utilize multiple channels while trying to meet this goal. It’s quite important for you and your team to keep this distinction in mind as you craft your strategy and choose your channels.

The specifics in crafting this campaign will depend on your business, your industry and the nature of your competitors. We can’t go into every possible specific scenario in this article, but we will go into some of the things you have to keep in mind. These are universal tips that will apply to just about any larger business trying to craft a well-rounded multi-channel marketing campaign.

Understand your buyer, analyze the data

To create a multi-channel strategy, you first must understand your buyer. Create personas based on the kind of person you want to reach.

• Are you trying to reach the CEO or a mid-level manager in charge of purchasing decisions?
• What kind of business is likely to purchase your service or product?
• Which of your products can they afford? What is their budget like?
• What are their main concerns and issues, and how does your product help solve them?

It will be crucial to understand all of this before you craft your multi-channel marketing strategy. You will need to know who you’re communicating with, and what message you’re trying to pass on.

To get the answers you need, go ahead and talk to your current customers and clients. Or alternatively, discuss these things with your sales team. Then go ahead and look into the data you have from all the marketing work you’ve done so far. Try to analyze this data with “fresh eyes” and ascertain how it relates to multi channel marketing.

Maintain a single customer view

Creating and maintaining a single view of the customer is critical. Today’s customers interact with brands in a variety of ways that have more than one touch point. Thus, it is crucial that you understand how your customers behave across all channels. You should also understand the value each customer has for your business.

To create a single customer view, try to merge all customer data in one place, regardless of the source.

However, having a lot of customer data is not nearly enough to get the job done. What you do with that data is even more important. Make sure to utilize the data when you’re developing and running your multi-channel campaigns.

Having a clearly defined buyer persona (or several personas) will help you decide on which channels you should focus your efforts the most.

Adopt an evolving customer view

Understanding your customers is a real-time process. You don’t just “get it” once and then you’re all done. The taste and preferences of customers change all the time, as does the marketplace.

If you want to speak their language, you must evolve along with them. Keep an eye on evolving trends and don’t be afraid to embrace the ones you think will bring you higher ROIs.  

Run email campaigns combined with social media efforts

There are several ways to effectively integrate these two channels. For example, you can track how potential customers are interacting with your digital ads.

Then, you can customize email campaigns based on the type and level of engagement that these people show. If no interest has been shown, you can then follow-up with a simple email campaign that will inform prospects about your company and its identity.

On the other hand, if people are engaging with your ads, you can drive an email campaign with clear calls to action that will increase your conversion rates.

Create consistent customer experiences across all channels

Customer experience is one of the most powerful ways to increase your competitiveness. As much as customer experience is important, doing your best to be consistent in providing excellence in your services is crucial.

Customers build an awareness about your brand through their interaction with your content on every channel. If they have a negative experience, they will associate that feeling with your brand, regardless of the channel. That’s why you should treat every channel as part of a broader living organism.

Otherwise, you risk turning customers away by failing to provide them with consistent quality service. And again, this doesn’t just refer to the actual products and services that you charge for. You need to treat all of your content across all of your channels as if it were the same as product or customer support. It is representative of your brand and its quality.

Experiment with various channels, test the effectiveness of your campaigns and find the right mix of channels that will place you in front of the right prospects at the right time.

Consider asking for help

If you’re still researching multi channel marketing and feeling overwhelmed, it’s quite normal. Crafting the right strategy is in fact complex and involves making many hundreds of informed decisions about dozens of channels. All of while considering thousands of data points for each.

It can, in fact, get quite overwhelming at first and it will take a while for your team to get the hang of it. If, however, you want to cut down on that learning curve, consider partnering with an experienced marketing team that can help you get things started on the right foot.

At DemandZEN, we’ve helped many large businesses develop effective multi channel marketing campaigns. Whether it’s simply coming up with an overall strategy or helping with each channel in particular, our team has the experience to make it happen.