Consumers can interact with brands in many ways and across multiple devices, so marketers need to create a strategy that helps them reach customers, no matter how much they choose to communicate.
Multi-channel marketing is becoming common in organizations as the number of potential channels increases over time. According to a Harvard Business Review study, 73 percent of consumers regularly use multiple engagement channels to engage with preferred retailers.
Because consumers often use multiple devices in a single day – often switching between cell phones, tablets, and laptops to perform the same tasks – marketers need to take advantage of a multi-channel marketing strategy.
What is multi-channel marketing?
Multi-channel marketing goes beyond running campaigns on various channels. A dedicated multi-channel marketing approach uses multiple channels for a single campaign. This preserves the user experience when interacting with the brand, regardless of the platform they use, and creates a broader network to reinforce the campaign in the customer’s eyes. For example, a single campaign uses the same bid, creative elements, and copies in social media, email, or paid advertisements.
Multi-channel marketing is the process of contacting a potential partner by potential customers through websites, digital advertisements, social media, direct mail, catalogs, email, mobile, or any other channel. Marketing your products and services through a single channel is not enough for today’s consumers. You have the option to store it on your mobile or even on the phone with a sales representative.
As the number of channels increases, marketers need to remain friendly and available to their potential customers. The goal of multi-channel marketing can allow the consumer to stay in touch with them whenever and wherever they want.
Marketing through multiple channels gives more choice to prospects, but the process still poses challenges. Because prospects interact with businesses on multiple channels, it is difficult to determine which channel has the most impact on conversions. Finding out which point of contact had the most decisive impact on sales allows marketers to make their campaigns more effective.
Another issue related to marketing through multiple channels is targeted marketing. Potential customers are more likely to convert if they receive personalized messages on their favorite channel.
According to a study by Infosys, 59% of individual shoppers believe that it affects shopping. When developing personalized messages, marketers need to create a single customer view, collecting information from multiple channels in one place.
The combination of direct or indirect channels with potential customers allows customers to participate in their chosen platform, providing a positive customer experience. Today, customer experience handles the major brand-differentiating factor of product and price, and most consumers want a more personalized shopping experience, with only 25% feeling like they would. By putting the right content in front of the right user at the right time, marketers are more likely to convert potential customers for their brand.
How business can reach customers through multiple channels
Consumers who use only one channel to make purchases tend to be older. Young people use multiple channels to research a brand before making a purchase. Therefore, businesses must build a strong presence on multiple channels, preparing for years to come when the percentage of potential customers purchasing through the same channel will decrease even further.
How can a company start marketing its capability through multiple channels? Multi-channel marketing may not provide a seamless experience like cross-channel marketing, but it is an extremely effective way for marketers to increase conversions. Here are some examples of marketing through various channels that your business can use:
1. Use social media to get potential customers to click through a landing page
Companies build strong social media followers by answering related industry content and consumer questions. Businesses can use their social media tracking on Facebook and Twitter to create their click-through landing pages with e-books, product demos, and more. Once these potential customers fill out the post-click landing page form, your business can email them new offers.
2. Keep an eye on how customers buy in stores
Beauty e-commerce business Birchbox opened a New York store in 2014. The aim was to track how customers purchase by storing the app as an app partner. In the store, customers received push notifications with special offers. Birchbox has also placed iPads in the store, showing product brochures.
Birchbox allows the app to collect customer data, including how many times a customer has been to the store and what products they have purchased. This information can be used in future marketing campaigns to send personalized offers via other channels such as email.
Difficulties with multi-channel marketing assignments
When marketing through multiple channels, it can be challenging to determine which aspects of a campaign are most effective. Marketers may see open fees for an email campaign, but a multi-channel campaign offers different opportunities for potential contact.
Can marketers determine which interactions have the most impact on conversions?
For example, a customer can personally visit a store and then sign up for an online email newsletter. They can follow social media posts on a company’s click-to-play landing page. All this before repenting. Which touch point had the most impact on the change? Was it an email newsletter? Or was it a social media post?
The marketing assignment remains a question without a clear answer. Several assignment models attempt to identify which points have the most impact on probabilities. The various assignment models are:
First Interaction: This model provides the first point of contact that a potential customer has interacted with full recognition of the conversion.
Last Interaction: This model specifies the endpoint of contact that the potential customer interacted with full recognition of the conversion.
Time degradation: This model attributes the most to the last touchpoint, and the closer each contact point is to the first interaction, the more conversions they get.
Linear Interaction: This model gives equal credit to all touchpoints.
Position-based: This model gives less credit to the middle touchpoint than the tangent points at the beginning and end.
72% of companies use the assignment model as a way to improve their budget through channels. Channels that make a significant impact on conversions get more money, while fewer channels get less. It helps companies improve ROI through multi-channel marketing campaigns:
Benefits of Multi-Channel Marketing
The multi-channel marketing approach allows customers and potential customers to have a consistent user experience when interacting with the brand. One benefit of this approach is reinforcing the brand’s marketing message. This allows marketing teams to ensure that the target audience sees the message on the channel they often treat and allows marketers to combine traditional and emerging channels to create online and offline user experiences.
The profitability of B2B campaigns using a multi-channel marketing approach increased by 24%. The performance of businesses using more than four channels increased by 300% compared to their one or two-channel campaign counterparts.
Additional benefits of multi-channel marketing include:
Increase visibility: Companies spread their marketing campaigns across multiple campaigns to increase their chances of seeing their future messages. By having more and more touchpoints within a campaign, brand awareness can increase, and future campaigns may have higher conversion rates.
Wide range of channels to reach customers: Using multiple channels allows marketers to get to know their target audience on the channel of their choice. The spread of the message through channels can be linked to offline and online marketing efforts and result in a broader target audience.
Better ability to stop competition: If we want to increase market share relative to the competition, the head-to-head route does not always win. It is essential to identify gaps in the competition and make up for them. When a campaign message is promoted on multiple channels, businesses can fill the gap left by their competitors if they do not take advantage of equal opportunities. If a competitor is not using a particular channel, it offers the marketing team a chance to reach their customers where there is no competition.
Integrated strategy: The spread of the campaign through multiple channels reflects its willingness to pursue an integrated marketing strategy. Using all channels available to the company and meeting customers where they improve marketing campaigns while improving efficiency and iteration in the future. With this method’s continuation, brand awareness will continue to increase as markets use them to cross-sell additional products or services.
What to include in a multi-channel marketing plan
A multi-channel marketing campaign is not an instant hit for campaign management but a long-term strategy based on prospects’ brand awareness and relationships. Marketing teams can run multiple short-term personal campaigns. Still, they need to be consistent in using all channels at their disposal. This will further strengthen this campaign over time, especially in the long term, such as real estate, finance, and automotive in businesses with sales cycles.
Some of the critical elements of a marketing campaign are:
- Websites or physical stores;
- Printing;
- Email and printed letters;
- Text message;
- Blogging and other premium content such as white papers, e-books, and Case studies;
- Sponsored media and other paid to advertise; And
- Social media.
An effective multi-channel marketing strategy uses a combination of all these elements to get a consistent message for your target market. It combines multiple channels into one comprehensive campaign.
In addition to unique content or channels, a multi-channel marketing plan should consider the basics of implementing these types of campaigns. A multi-channel marketing campaign is required:
- Detailed customer and customer personal profiles;
- Specific, measurable, reliable, realistic, and timely (SMART) goals to acquire new customers and retain customers or make repeat purchases;
- Marketing strategy, which combines inbound and outbound marketing approaches by aligning content and sales;
- The ability of the marketing team to track and gather data through integrated channels for possible customization; And
- Understanding how marketing teams will measure effectiveness results.
- By creating this foundation, marketing teams can identify where sales are coming from and how – or where – they are allocating resources and budgets in future campaigns.
Many companies also integrate other organizational plans – such as a digital marketing plan, a comprehensive marketing plan, and a custom campaign plan – into a multi-channel marketing approach. Effective integration of these plans can result in a long-term integrated communication strategy, which attracts and replaces sales goals.