What is cross-channel marketing, and how can you get started?
In today's world, where companies are constantly searching for new ways to promote their products and meet customer demands, technology is a dream come true. The goal is to maximize the number of digital channels available. This goal can be achieved by cross-channel marketing: exposing your brand while creating a wholesome shopping experience for customers.
Marketing used to be very linear, but with the evolution of digital tools and broadcasts today it is possible to create a synergistic effect by connecting different channels that guide customers on their path to purchase.
Marketing efforts are increasingly unified with the world becoming a global village. Cross-channel marketing uses various platforms to drive sales and give customers the best experience. These platforms range from verbal recommendations to social media campaigns, websites, emails, blog post, and mobile apps.
What is Cross-Channel Marketing?
Cross-channel marketing is a customer-focused strategy that combines different channels to communicate effectively with customers. This combination ensures that your customers move smoothly from one stage of the buyer journey to the next, creating a more cohesive customer journey. The goal is to present a similar brand story to customers across an array of channels, bearing in mind their peculiarities.
Businesses that use this approach take advantage of strategies like push notifications, promotional emails, bulk SMS and personalized marketing messages using Facebook messenger. These methods work together to increase their effectiveness.
In other words, cross-channel marketing is the term used to describe a consistent brand message across multiple channels. The channels could be paid, owned, or earned media.
What are the advantages of this type of marketing?
You may be wondering if it’s worth switching from your traditional marketing to a cross-channel marketing strategy. Here are some reasons why it’s worth doing so:
Reach a wider audience
By using multiple marketing channels, companies can reach more people. In addition, cross-channel marketing—a strategy that combines different types of marketing media—can be helpful for businesses that need to reach a specific demographic (like Baby Boomers who primarily use television and radio ads). For example, Gen Xers and Millennials are more likely to respond to mobile and social media advertisements.
Increase brand awareness and recognition
Cross-channel strategies can help companies create a stronger brand image by portraying consistent messages across different platforms. A strong brand image can help companies gain long-term customers and increase sales.
Build customer relationships
Companies can use cross-channel marketing to interact with their customers on multiple platforms. This strategy can help build strong relationships over time, because customers expect companies to provide a consistent experience across different channels.
Increase conversion rates
By delivering consistent messages across different platforms, marketers can increase brand awareness, customer experience, and customer engagement. This will lead to higher conversion rates and stronger brand loyalty.
Generate leads and sales
Ultimately, your goal as a marketer is to generate leads and sales. By delivering consistent messages across channels, you can keep your brand top-of-mind and encourage potential customers to take the next step in their purchase journey.
Create a seamless customer experience
Cost-effective
Reusing content across different platforms is cost-effective, because it allows companies to save money on development, production, and promotion costs. This way, companies can get the most out of their marketing efforts.
Easily measure results
By measuring marketing performance, marketers can evaluate which channel is working best and which one needs to be improved. Repurposing content can help you reach more people with fewer resources.
Increased ROI
When it comes to cross-channel marketing, the right strategy can lead to a higher ROI. With this strategy, brands reach out to more potential customers, create a seamless experience for their customers, and are cost-effective.
How to Plan Your Multi-Channel Strategy
1. Create Buyer Personas:
Before creating a marketing strategy for customers, it is essential to understand them. A buyer persona should include information on what buyers want, when they want it, how they want it and their preferred mode of communication. These are crucial in the process of developing a buyer persona.
You can get this information in many ways. For example, if you have a large social media following, you can use social listening to learn about what consumers are saying about your business. You can also observe buyers closely and monitor which channels have the most traffic to obtain valuable insight into their buying habits. This way you will be able to meet their needs more effectively.
Creating a rich buyer persona doesn't stop at knowing the needs of people. It entails journeying through the buyer experience from start to finish, beginning with contact with your target audience and ending with payment. This way, you can figure out the strengths and weaknesses of your business and identify areas that are ripe for improvement or modification toward effective marketing.
2. Use Channels that Complement Each Other
When choosing platforms, it's important to be intuitive. You want to choose channels that work well together. For example, mobile and retail stores, TV and mobile, radio and computer and TV—the list goes on. While choosing, try to include the channels that customers use most often with your brand.
3. Analyze Your Marketing Strategy
This can be done by grouping users who do not receive ads from your marketing campaigns, and assessing the effectiveness and impact of these campaigns. This is relevant as it helps marketers understand what needs to be optimized or removed, and tells them to refrain from using certain strategies with particular groups of customers.
4. Consolidate the Results of Your Research
Creating a powerful cross-channel strategy requires integrating your findings with marketing data insights. However, making an impact goes beyond using the strategy alone.
We must therefore ask ourselves, which social media platform is best? Does your social media platform support web strategy? Does your campaign pass the same message across all channels? Are you targeting a suitable customer base? Do all the channels work in harmony?
When your strategy answers these questions, you can create a better experience for customers. Customers will always choose brands that they trust, because they know what to expect.
5. Take Advantage of Social Media Platforms
Social media has become part of our daily lives, with billions of people worldwide connecting to create a social community. There’s no easier way to reach out to thousands of people than through social media platforms.
People are more likely to follow directions if they are illustrated or pictorial. For example, social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and others use visuals to attract and keep the attention of customers and make it possible to communicate quickly and directly with them. This can hardly happen with other channels.
Social media platforms can help you build awareness of your brand. This can lead to increased sales by directing customers to other channels where they come in contact with your products.
6. Design Buyer-Specific Content
Each customer’s journey is unique. Your content strategy must be consistent with each customer's behavior and buying habits.For example, you can send appreciation text messages to customers who have just purchased a product or offer a discount to customers who have abandoned their cart. Personalization can improve sales by encouraging customers to engage with your content.
Conclusion
Customers engage with different channels to fulfill their needs. As a result, the most successful brands keep their customers satisfied while expanding their awareness and making sales through various channels. Cross-channel marketing enables you to do just that—it will lead you to shoppers at the right time and turn them into customers. However, it requires the right technology and mode of work for practical impact across all channels.
Our platform allows you to run effective campaigns in multiple channels while providing all the insights you need about your customers. Contact us to know more about our tool or book a demo today!
