How to excel at multichannel marketing: Overview and benefits
In today’s competitive environment, businesses can’t afford to have a single-channel marketing strategy. Leveraging multichannel marketing is the new standard. Running a robust multichannel marketing campaign increases lead generation, lead conversion, and revenue.
But it’s critical that you have a proper plan in place to run an effective multichannel marketing campaign. In this article, we will discuss how you can make the most of your multichannel marketing strategy.
What is multichannel marketing?
Multichannel marketing involves using multiple channels for interacting with your customers and prospects. The aim of multichannel marketing is to engage your prospects and customers through every possible channel. That includes both online and offline mediums like:
- Brand or company’s website
- Social media
- Push notifications
- Billboards
- Promotional flyers
In multichannel marketing, business leverage a unified marketing strategy to deliver the same message on multiple channels.
Interacting through multiple channels increases the effectiveness of a business’s customer interactions. Customers look for multiple channels throughout the purchasing cycle. According to a Forbes report, 46 percent of retailers say that customers research products on the web but prefer to make actual purchases in a store. 33 percent of retailers say that customers make online purchases and 18 percent say that most of the customer purchases happen in a store.
This shows that customers use multiple channels before making an actual purchase. Thus, it’s essential for businesses to leverage a multichannel marketing approach.
Let’s shed some light on three significant benefits of multichannel marketing.
Benefits of multichannel marketing
Knowing which channel works better
Multichannel marketing helps you to understand which channels are preferred by your customers. You can also determine which channel propagates which message better. It is important that you share the correct message through the most appropriate channel.
For example, to share photos, Instagram and Pinterest are better. But when it comes to social communication, Facebook is more effective. These insights can vastly improve your marketing campaign’s response rates and efficiency.
Increase brand visibility
Leveraging multichannel marketing also increases brand visibility. Nowadays, it’s easy for people to dismiss marketing messages. But multichannel marketing ensures that people see your message on different channels. This also gives you a competitive edge over other businesses who use a single channel for sharing messages.
A unified approach to marketing campaigns
In multichannel marketing, a single marketing campaign works on multiple channels simultaneously. This allows them to support and complement each other. When a single campaign works on multiple channels, it generates an average 24 percent more return on investment [ROI].
Those are a few benefits of implementing a multichannel marketing strategy. But it’s critical that you avoid jumping to multiple channels without a proper plan. Below are a few tips to help you master running a multichannel marketing campaign.
Tips to mastering multichannel marketing
Collect and maintain data
You need authentic data to run multichannel marketing campaigns. Ensure that you always keep your collected data relevant and refreshed. Also, ensure that you are using the data available to you. Create a centralized data repository that helps your team to retrieve customer information and other actionable insights. In this way, you can efficiently run your campaigns and produce better results.
Leverage a customer relationship management (CRM) system
Having a robust CRM software system provides you with insights that facilitate better communication. CRM software provides your team with a holistic view of leads and customers. With marketing automation in CRM software, your team can boost the efficiency of your multichannel marketing campaigns.
Maintain a consistent customer experience
It is essential that your multichannel marketing campaign looks the same on every device. Pick the same colors and images for every message on different platforms. Customers should be able to identify a link between your two posts on two different devices. This is critical as Google cites that 90 percent of users move between at least two screens every day.
Walker cites that user experience is going to take center stage by 2020 as a key brand differentiator. Thus, delivering a coherent and constant user experience is always important while running multichannel marketing campaigns.
Conclusion
Multichannel marketing is key to increasing engagement and loyalty. Leveraging multichannel marketing also increases retention rates. It’s essential that you keep all your campaigns coherent and constant across the channels while running multichannel marketing campaigns.
With the right tools and approach, multichannel marketing can increase conversion rates and boost revenue. Use the above-mentioned tips to efficiently run your multichannel marketing campaigns and produce better results.
