Many business owners have a hard time trying to balance marketing their business and other things in business and life.
You don’t have to perform tricks to make your business successful. You can use the following tips to make your business successful without jumping through hoops. Below, I’ll provide the answers to issues like:
- What is cross-channel marketing?
- The difference between cross-channel and multi-channel marketing.
- How to know if cross-channel marketing is right for you.
- Benefits of cross-channel marketing.
- The right number of channels in cross-channel marketing.
- How to implement your cross-channel marketing strategy.
- Where do my customers come from?
- Who is my central buyer persona?
What are some essential questions for marketers that are often left unanswered?
We get many of our answers from our customers.
You can find out a lot of information about people from today’s advertising platforms. This can include things like their favorite breakfast cereal.
Although this information is useful, it is difficult to access. Ad platforms do not make this marketing data easily available. When the data is coming from many different sources, it is difficult to identify the most valuable insights.
Instagram provides metrics on paid ads, organic ads, and Instagram Reels. That gives us metrics from a single source, ranging from impressions to cost per view.
However, your customers don’t limit themselves to a single channel source. A study by Harvard Business Review shows that 73% of customers use multiple channels during their decision-making process.
Google’s survey found that when browsing from a desktop, consumers interact with 3.4 touchpoints before making a purchase.
So, what’s the solution? Cross-channel marketing analytics.
This article provides an overview of the best practices for cross-channel marketing analytics, including a discussion of the most effective tools available and how to properly utilize them.
What Is Cross-Channel Marketing Analytics?
Cross-channel marketing analytics assesses marketing metrics from a variety of sources to get a comprehensive view of how marketing is performing. This approach allows marketers to collect data from websites, social media, paid channels, and other platforms to get a more holistic understanding of their marketing efforts.
Imagine that you are given a Lego set without an image of the final result. It’s just a pile of plastic pieces that you can turn into anything. These pieces are your metrics. Now imagine that you are given a Lego set with an image of the final result. It is still a pile of plastic pieces that you can turn into anything, but the image provides some guidance. These pieces are your KPIs.
Cross-channel marketing analytics allows you break down each marketing campaign into its own independent pieces so you can examine it more deeply. By doing this you can build your own marketing strategy that is tailored to your audience and business needs, rather than following a generic marketing plan.
Marketing Strategy Around Cross-Channel Analytics
Cross-channel marketing analytics provides a complete picture of how effective marketers’ activities are.
To optimize your marketing campaigns and create an efficient marketing funnel, you need to answer questions about how often customers take action after seeing your banners and emails, and how often they make offline purchases after discovering your brand online.
Analytics that encompass multiple channels provides insights as to why customers convert and how to increase that conversion rate.
The issue is that customers infrequently search for a precise item and immediately purchase it. Instead, they embark on a buying journey.
In order to become a client, first a potential customer must learn of your brand’s existence. Then they investigate your brand more closely, evaluating what values you offer and what problems you solve. Finally, they compare your company to others, reading user reviews to ensure that you are the best fit for their needs.
Organizations can accelerate their growth by understanding where leads fall out of the funnel and what channels drive buying decisions.
There are other ways to reach out to customers across different channels besides cross-channel marketing.
Multichannel vs. Omnichannel vs. Cross-Channel Marketing
There are three concepts that sound the same, but have distinct differences. These concepts are a further step toward a seamless customer experience.
Multichannel Marketing
Cross-channel marketing is the term used to describe marketing initiatives that span multiple channels. Omnichannel marketing is the term used to describe an integrated approach to marketing that seeks to provide a consistent customer experience across all channels. Multichannel marketing is the practice of marketing across multiple channels. This could include channels such as print, online, social media, and more. With multichannel marketing, each channel works independently.
A lack of connection between sources makes it more difficult to gather and interpret marketing analytics.
Cross-channel Marketing
Cross-channel marketing is a type of marketing that shares data across channels to deliver a better customer experience.
All of the channels work together to provide cross-channel analytics and identify the strengths and weaknesses of each touchpoint.
Omnichannel Marketing
Omnichannel marketing is more advanced than its counterparts because it enables the use of multiple channels at the same time.
For instance, customers can find out more about the product by looking it up online while they are at the physical store.
This increased level of data connectivity provides new opportunities for marketing analytics, such as data-driven lead attribution.
On the other hand, there should be a tool to store and process your marketing data. The more data you gather, the more time and effort you must invest in extracting actionable insights from it. That’s why marketers use data warehouses and ETL systems to untangle their data mess.
The following marketing methods are all quite similar: cross-channel marketing, omnichannel marketing, and multichannel marketing. Though there are some minor differences between them, each one affects marketing performance in a very different way.
Is Cross-Channel Marketing Right for You?
Cross-channel marketing is ultimately better than multi-channel marketing. You should use cross-channel marketing if you want to be successful.
- You want to maximize your results. Since cross-channel marketing involves customizing your offers to a person’s stage in the funnel, their chances of conversion at each of those points are much higher. Plus, this personalized approach helps to make your brand more memorable and increases your chances of turning prospects into customers.
- You’re tight on time. You read that right! Many people think cross-channel marketing takes a ton of time. But when you unify your efforts across platforms, you can streamline processes like asset creation and report.
- You’re tight on budget. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. If you’re tight on budget you’ll want plenty of opportunities to squeeze the most out of it across platforms, rather than spending it all on one with no results.
- You have a busy audience. Most people are bouncing around many places across the web, with cross-channel marketing you’re catching your audience at every step of the sales funnel.
Benefits of Cross-Channel Marketing
While we touched on some of the pros of cross-channel marketing above, you may also want to consider these statistics when deciding if this strategy is right for you:
In order for the average consumer to become a customer, they need to interact with the brand at least seven times. Cross-channel marketing helps to make each of those encounters super-relevant, potentially reducing the number of encounters needed.
Most consumers want brands to have a more consistent presence and provide a seamless experience throughout the buyer’s journey. Cross-channel marketing allows for this by uniting different platforms, rather than keeping them siloed as multi-channel marketing does.
Brands that use three or more marketing channels see a nearly three times higher conversion rate than brands that use fewer channels.
Businesses that engage with people across multiple channels see a nearly 90% return rate of customers. This means that cross-channel marketing can be effective in increasing brand loyalty over time.
Cross-channel marketing is essential to reaching your marketing goals.
By running cross-channel campaigns, your brand will become more visible across the internet and through physical channels of communication.
The main idea behind cross-channel marketing is to ensure your product is top of mind among your target audience. This means creating a consistent brand message and delivering it across multiple channels, such as online, in-store, through direct mail, and more. By doing so, you’ll be able to reach your audience where they are, with the right message, at the right time.
If you were to hear a radio ad every day for a brand new Mercedes, it would have a deeper impact if you were driving a 10-year-old car with some technical issues.
How Many Channels Should Your Cross-Channel Marketing Include?
How many channels are enough channels? This is a valid question as most brands want to get the most out of their limited resources. However, there is no one right or wrong answer to this question.
The number of channels that businesses use varies depending on the organization’s goals and challenges. It is more important to be able to connect and integrate the channels into a marketing system.
Even still, you might have multi-channel efforts happening alongside your cross-channel efforts—as it’s not possible to connect every single channel and effort. So if you’re not sure how many ad channels to use, here are some things to consider:
Budget
Your marketing budget will affect how much you can spend on each of your desired marketing channels.
You shouldn’t just blast your marketing across as many channels as possible if you have a large budget. You should think about how much you need to allocate to each channel.
If you are having difficulty calculating your marketing budget, there are many resources available to assist you, such as this post on creating your marketing budget. As a general guideline, a good rule of thumb is to allocate 5-10% of your revenue towards your marketing budget. For larger businesses, that number could be increased to 14% or more.
Audience
When choosing your channels, think about your ideal customer and what their daily life is like. Consider how many channels they use, where they live, and their age.
You can determine how many channels you need to reach your audience effectively by asking yourself exploratory questions about them.
If you see Facebook ads or Instagram posts about a car you heard about on the radio, you might feel jealous and want to buy the car.
Finally, you’re watching a film where the main character drives the same car that you’ve been driving all day long.
After all of those ads, you might find yourself at a dealership the following morning.
The main point of cross-channel marketing is to make your brand visible and have the same values shared across different channels to grow your audience. This is called increasing your Share of Voice (SoV) in marketing terms.
Goals
The number of channels you use for marketing will be influenced by your business’s marketing goals. For example, if you want to increase your online presence, you may need to add social media to your strategy—even if you haven’t used it before.
Resources
One individual or team can only do so much in a day, but you may have other tools that can make cross-channel management easier.
If you want to save time on your marketing, see if you can summarize your reports across channels, or if there are any platforms you can use to send out multiple marketing assets at once.
It is understandable that everyone will have different answers to the question. If you need help picking where to start, use three channels. This will help you see what works instead of using one or two channels. You can always add more channels later.
It’s Easier Than You Think
Despite the common belief that cross-channel marketing is out of reach for most businesses, this guide provides evidence to the contrary. With some reflection and the use of online tools and platforms, cross-channel marketing can be a key driver of acquiring and keeping customers, essential for any business hoping to grow sustainably.
To recap, here is how to do cross-channel marketing effectively:
- Map out your customer journey
- Choose your channels
- Prep your content ahead of time
- Take inventory of your costs
- Have a set of overarching goals
- Use a CRM
- Use retargeting
- Button up your tracking
- Use multi-touch attribution
- Keep your reporting all in one place
- Try nurture email campaigns
- Be patient