How to Create a Multi-Channel Marketing Strategy
To implement a single strategy over multiple platforms or channels, you need a multi-channel marketing strategy. This type of strategy allows you to maximize opportunities for interacting with prospective clients. What a multi-channel marketing strategy does is to interact with prospects from different communication channels. You can interact with them via an actual retail location, a website, an email, a promotional event, a print ad, an SMS message, via word-of-mouth or a mobile app. You can also interact with a prospective customer via a product’s package.
Using this strategy is critical since prospective customers are scattered over several channels. To reach them all, you must reach all the channels. This is why a multichannel marketing strategy is critical.
Below is a guide on how to create a multi-channel marketing strategy:
1. Establish a Clear Goal
Establishing a clear goal is one of the most important steps in creating a multi-channel marketing strategy. Without a clearly-defined goal, you won’t know what you are aiming at. Not having a goal means you won’t have a way of knowing whether or not your marketing strategy is working. Since this strategy involves multiple channels, each with different performance metrics, it’s doubly essential to start off with a clearly-defined goal. Is your goal to expand market share, enhance the reach of your brand, generate traffic, boost social dominance or increase sales?
Any or a combination of the above can be the main goal of your marketing strategy. Whatever the case, you cannot have a strategy without a goal. When you know what you are aiming at, you are in a better position to determine which channels are most appropriate and which key performance indicators (KPIs) to track.
2. Define and Understand Your Target Audience
With an audience scattered across diverse online and offline channels, reaching all of them cannot depend on a one-size-fits-all solution. You need a multi-faceted, multi-channel approach to marketing to reach your audience. But first, you need to know who your audience is and then understand their habits and behaviours. For instance, if the product you are marketing is designed for voracious gamers and diehard geeks, you can’t target them with a marketing strategy for the elderly.
Each of these brands has a separate audience. It will require a different multi-channel marketing strategy to reach each audience. Therefore, a clear understanding of your audience is critical when designing a marketing strategy, especially a multi-channel one.
3. Integrate the Marketing Departments
To successfully implement a multi-channel strategy, integrate all the relevant departments. You will need a distributed marketing platform to do this effectively. In some cases, this will require dismantling existing silos and aligning everyone with the marketing strategy.
4. Automate
Automation is at the core of a successful multi-channel marketing system. Luckily, courtesy of the digital era we are living in, this is extremely practical. You can have some level of control over a basic, one-channel marketing system. However, to reach a diverse audience with a multi-channel strategy, you need to automate the system. Start by automating as much of the process as possible.
There are several Customer Relationship Management software that is ideally suited for this task. You can use software to track and automate a user’s interaction with your brand. Some CRM software can interact with almost all the channels in your system, creating user profiles upon contact with your brand. As users continue to interact with your brand, their profiles are updated.
5. Ensure User Experience Consistency
When using a multi-channel system, the user experience must remain consistent throughout. Whatever channels they interact with, their experience should be consistent. The colours, logo, styles, media, etc should be uniform. This enhances brand retention and memorability, critical ingredients of a successful multi-channel marketing strategy. With a solid, instantly recognizable brand, your conversion rates and ROI are likely to skyrocket. On the other hand, if the user experience across your channels is inconsistent, your ROI and conversion rates will take a hit. Your brand is also likely to suffer as a result.
6. Track the Results
The proof of the cooking is always in the pudding. A multi-channel marketing strategy is only as successful as the results indicate. You need a system of tracking campaigns run on a multi-channel platform. If you can’t measure it, it didn’t happen. No matter how sophisticated a campaign is, if you can’t track results, you can’t tell if it’s working or not. Forget the hype and use analytics to establish how the campaign is doing. Without actionable data from your campaign, you can’t tell whether the campaign was successful or not. If it matters, measure it!
To track and measure results, your CRM and the analytics software must be integrated. This way, you can see results from individual channels at a glance. You can also compare results across the channels. For instance, by looking at the data, you can tell if introducing a particular channel had a positive or negative impact on the marketing strategy. Although it’s more difficult to track offline user activity, it can be done by ingeniously offering special coupons to offline clients or send prospects to a specially-designed landing page.
A multi-channel marketing strategy is a critical component in every company. It looks at marketing from the realities of online and offline user behaviour. With people using different channels to interact with a brand, a multi-channel marketing strategy integrates the different channels to reach different user demographics.
