In today's hyperconnected digital world, businesses face the constant challenge of effectively reaching out to and engaging with their customers. The 21st century buyer expects companies to ensure consistency across all interactions, no matter where and when they take place.
Against this backdrop, how can firms deliver excellent experiences to their clientele, at all times? What does it take to ensure a seamless, fully-connected buying journey? You must formulate a robust multi-channel marketing strategy. Today, we’ll look at the benefits of implementing a good multi-channel marketing strategy and how to develop one. But first, let’s briefly see what multi-channel marketing is all about.
What Is Multi-channel Marketing?
Multi-channel marketing is a marketing paradigm that involves using multiple communication platforms (channels) to reach out to customers. These channels can include but are not limited to the following.
Brick-and-mortar outlets
Digital advertising (including paid ads on search engines and social networks)
Website and blog
Direct mail
E-mail
Mail-order catalogs
Mobile apps
Print media
Television and radio
The primary goal of multi-channel marketing is to deliver a consistent message and brand experience across all channels. A well-formulated multi-channel marketing strategy enables your clients to engage with your organization effectively in a convenient manner. Multi-channel marketing leverages the merits of each channel to provide high-quality experiences to customers, and thereby, facilitates strong relationships with them.
Let’s now proceed to examine the key benefits of multi-channel marketing.
Why Is Good Multi-channel Marketing Effective in Facilitating Business Success?
Multi-channel marketing empowers firms to enhance customer engagement levels, ensure high levels of consistency in brand messaging, reach out to more customers effectively and facilitate a delightful buying journey. Given below are some of the major benefits your company can enjoy by creating a solid multi-channel marketing framework.
Brand Message Can Be Delivered to a Bigger Audience
This is arguably the most important benefit of implementing a well-defined multi-channel marketing strategy. Today, people consume content delivered across a wide variety of digital media along with more traditional means of communication such as print and television. A good multi-channel marketing strategy helps you reach out to people using different channels with high levels of efficacy, thereby enabling you to convey your message to a very large audience.
Customer Engagement Levels Are Enhanced in a Big Way
A multi-channel marketing strategy allows you to connect with a client on the channel of his choice. This goes a long way in helping you engage him well - by suitably adapting your marketing content for the channel, you can deliver your brand message very effectively. Needless to say, the results are significantly-higher conversion rates and stronger relationships with your customers.
Consistency Can Be Ensured in Brand Messaging
As we have seen, the new-age customer uses a plethora of communication channels. A robust multi-channel marketing strategy helps you deliver your brand message consistently across all channels in a highly efficient manner. This, in turn, will help your company improve its image and gain the trust of your clientele.
Client Preferences Can Be Understood Very Well
A properly-formulated mix of marketing channels enables you to collect client data efficiently, thereby allowing you to understand the needs of your customers effectively. This, in turn, will allow you to come up with relevant, appealing marketing content and target the customers better. Your clients will appreciate your efforts to connect with them where they are and personalize their experiences leading to a strong belief that you comprehend their requirements well. Remember, a customer is very likely to come back if he feels you know what he wants.
So far, we’ve have seen what multi-channel marketing is and how it benefits businesses. We will now move on to examine the steps involved in formulating the winning multi-channel marketing strategy.
How Can You Develop a Multi-channel Marketing Strategy that Delivers the Desired Results?
You need to follow the steps below to come up with an effective strategy to leverage multiple channels to achieve your marketing goals.
Step 1 - Identify Your Target Audience
It’s very important you have a clear idea of whom your business intends to target. You must come up with a comprehensive buyer persona that lists specific details about your ideal customer - this will help your team determine which channels it should focus on and what the tone of the marketing message should be.
Step 2 - Zero-in on the Channels You Must Focus on
In an ideal world, where there are no budgetary constraints for your marketing team, you would be able to transmit your brand message through ALL channels. But, in reality, most marketers often have to grapple with tight budgets (especially in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic). This requires you to identify the channels that allow you to connect with most of your customers. Use your buyer persona and consider your specific marketing goals to list the channels that enable you to maximize your reach to clientele. Begin your efforts using these channels and expand to others in a phased manner depending on your needs.
Step 3 - Come Up with Single Message for All Channels
In most cases, marketing departments of companies are made up of teams that specialize in different channels. While this helps the businesses make the best use of each channel, it could also lead to ‘marketing silos’ where each team works independent of the others. This can lead to disconnected experiences across various channels leading to confusion when customers switch from one channel to another. So, it is very important to make sure each team has a clear understanding of your ideal customer and crafts messages that have the same essence irrespective of the channel of their focus.
Step 4 - Adapt Content to Suit Each Channel
Although you must ensure your messages transmitted over different channels have the same essence, you should adapt the message for each of the channels. For instance, you need to come up with compelling visual content such as videos for channels such as Instagram and Pinterest, while long-form textual content such as articles can be posted on platforms such as LinkedIn. It is advisable to develop robust content strategies for each channel and create content in different formats.
Step 5 - Integrate Customer Experiences Across Platforms
You must see your clients have seamless, consistent experiences across all marketing channels. There is no point in using X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, e-mail, a website etc., if you can’t work with them in unison for attracting prospects and converting them into dollar-giving customers. Most potential customers use multiple channels quickly, and you must ensure you formulate the right strategies to deal accordingly. Many companies use a common inbox to handle customer communications through different channels, a unified marketing management tool to efficiently manage all content-publishing and analytics activities and a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system for tracking client interactions and engagement.
Step 6 - Execute a Well-designed Marketing Automation Framework
Implementing a robust marketing automation strategy goes a long way in enabling you to track interactions and engagement very effectively. By combining the capabilities of marketing automation tool with your CRM system, you can make the right, timely decisions and personalize buying journeys leveraging the wealth of data pertaining to pages visited, Calls-to-Action (CTAs) clicked and e-mails opened.
Step 7 - Make Sure Your Website Is Fully Responsive
Your website is a key element of your multi-channel marketing strategy. Ensure your website can be accessed seamlessly using any device including desktop and laptop computers and mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. This will go a long way in delivering excellent experiences to the website’s visitors, significantly increasing the chances of their successful conversion into customers.
Step 8 - Implement a Well-defined Attribution Mechanism
When your company uses multiple channels to connect with its customers, your marketing team must come up with a good system to measure the efficacy of the multi-platform approach. It is necessary to leverage closed-loop analytics by using state-of-the-art AI-powered tools to get a clear idea as to which platforms are yielding the desired results, which platforms are influencing other platforms and which platforms can be taken out of your marketing strategy.
Step 9 - Focus on Retargeting
Retargeting is an advertising strategy that calls for targeting the bounced traffic on a website on other channels. The strategy is very useful when you implement it together with multi-channel marketing. It’s advisable to enable your customers to reach your website from multiple channels to increase traffic to the website - people who bounce away from the website can see retargeting advertisements on other channels that you use.
I’d like to conclude by saying a well-formulated multi-channel marketing strategy goes a long way in helping you reach out to your customers with very high levels of efficacy. At SunYello, we work with you to unleash the power of multi-channel marketing to facilitate smooth customer experiences and maximize conversion rates. Our rich experience working with companies of all sizes in diverse sectors coupled with our strong focus on comprehending your unique marketing needs allows us to provide the right solution that delivers the best ROI.
Hope you like this post. How do you use multiple channels to meet your marketing goals? We’d love to know.
