Cross-channel marketing is a customer-focused digital marketing technique used by marketers globally to provide an integrated experience across all paid, owned, earned media, and digital experiences.
Digital Marketing Post
‘Cross-channel,’ ‘multi-channel,’ ‘integrated’ are just some of the terms used by marketers to describe campaigns that run across multiple channels and platforms.
It is a powerful way of designing your marketing strategy and implementing data and analysis to create Omni channel customer journeys towards your goals.
In today’s modern marketing era, there are many channels a business can take advantage of to reach potential customers. These channels include:
Retail storefronts
PPC and other online advertising
Website (including content marketing/blogging)
Direct mail
Email marketing
Mail-order catalogs
Mobile marketing
Why Is Multi-Channel Marketing
The reality is that you’re likely to be using more than one channel, and having a way to tie those channels together to achieve a common goal is going to play a key part in making your marketing efforts a success, regardless of whether you’re using paid media, SEO, digital PR or CRO.
Reasons To Use A Cross – Channel Strategy
1. Improves Brand Awareness
When users observe your business in various places there are big chances to make them interested and encourage them to discover more about your business.
Invest time into creating these persons to figure out what your customers like and what they don’t. Think beyond the classic customer behavioral patterns to come up with a diverse range of buyer profiles. Remember, the better you know each of your buyers the more accurate your strategy will be.
As a marketer, you need to be where your customers and prospects are - taking into account that customer journeys span across offline and online channels. For a complete view of how customers engage across channels, a heavily approach will not be sufficient. In an increasingly connected world, marketers need to ensure that their campaigns aren’t in fragmented parts.
2. Increased Engagement
Emotional connections between consumers and brands are built through engaging interactions, and they are often the deciding factor that can turn your target audience into brand-loyal customers.
Customers interact with brands on a wide variety of channels, so if you want to drive successful engagement, you have to put your brand in front of the customer instead of waiting for them to find you. Consider using strategic hashtags and encourage users to share your content with direct response marketing.
Best Practices For A Cross – Channel Strategy
1. Set Objectives
From the start, you need to set precise but attainable goals and to decide what will help you to accomplish those purposes. At the same time, you need to find relevant attributes for avoiding the avalanche of data.
Defining the right Key Performance Indicators for your app category is a must when you want to create a smart plan.
2. Element Carefully
This is the mandatory step before you create your message. While you need to know your users to build a successful strategy it is better to be patient and to allow them to reveal their characteristics one by one.
3. Be Consistent Across Different Channels
In case you use various themes even for similar platforms, people won’t be able to make the connection between your message and your app.
While you have to change your point of view for various channels you also need to maintain certain uniformity for allowing customers to understand your brand.
4. Create Customer Personas with Aggregate and Person-level Data
Comprehensive customer profiles can help evaluate your target audience’s motivation and shopping habits, and get a better idea of what and who they are already engaging with.
By combining both aggregate and person-level customer data, you can uncover patterns and commonalities between groups, allowing you to identify segments within your audience.
5. Utilize the Right Marketing Technology
Strong analytics is what gives us actionable insights into our customer’s preferences, so you must choose a marketing technology that gathers accurate, high-quality data.
Automation is another key functionality to consider when determining what tool is going to best fit the needs of your company. With the right marketing performance solution, marketers can gain a more holistic understanding of their target audience. Among other things, marketing technologies should enable the marketing team to optimize:
When they show ads,
Which channels they display their ads on, and
The messages they use to interact with their target audience.
An effective marketing tech stack should streamline communications and help to create a cohesive customer journey that identifies and leverages the channels and messages that your target audience is engaging with the most.