The way brands market to customers has changed in recent years due to advances in technology. Customers now have many more options for finding, researching, and interacting with brands, so the focus for many brands is no longer on closing the sale, but on the customer journey.
Multichannel marketing is a way to reach your customers using multiple platforms. It is important to provide consistent messaging across all channels to ensure that buyers are able to convert.
In order to successfully sell to customers using cross-platform marketing, one must first gain a basic understanding of the definition of multichannel marketing. This understanding should include strategy implementation and ongoing analysis with the right tools.
What Is Multichannel Marketing?
The multichannel marketing definition is fairly simple and refers to the process of connecting with customers across multiple communication mediums. Multichannel marketing can be both direct and indirect and might include the use of platforms such as:
- Websites
- Print catalogs
- In-store messaging
- Social media
- Targeted advertising
- Direct mail
- EmailÂ
- Text and SMS
Utilizing multiple channels in marketing has been shown to create higher quality leads and more conversions. It is presumed that when a company uses more than one method of communication that is tailored to the customer’s lifestyle, preferences, and needs, they are more likely to make a purchase.
Multichannel and Omnichannel Marketing
Your customer’s experience with your brand begins the moment they have their first interaction with it. This could be across multiple platforms, such as email, your website, or a retail store. Having a consistent brand experience across all channels makes it easy for consumers to engage with your brand at every stage of the sales funnel.
Yes, multichannel marketing and omnichannel marketing are different. Let’s compare the two definitions to see the differences.
Multichannel marketing is a type of marketing that uses multiple platforms to reach potential and existing customers. It might include using different channels to reach customers through a single campaign.
If you were to visualize multichannel marketing, it would be similar to a hub and spoke model. The core product or service would be the hub, while the channels used to reach the customer would be the spokes. Each path would lead the customer down the conversion funnel.
In contrast, omnichannel marketing is focused on the customer experience. The goal of omnichannel marketing is to provide a consistent engagement with the customer, regardless of how they are interacting with the business. This makes the customer experience as simple as possible.
Omnichannel marketing offers a more immersive experience for customers by connecting them with your product or service through a single integrated pathway. This pathway is designed to funnel customers down the sales process in a way that creates a cohesive approach.
Why Is Multichannel Marketing Important?
There are a few marketing tactics you can use to connect with your viewers. Multichannel marketing plans allow you to do just that- giving you more opportunities to grow customer interactions, leads, and conversions.
A recent study conducted by Invesp, a conversion rate optimization service, found that the number of marketers using three or four platforms to reach consumers has increased from 44% to 52% over the past five years, proving that multichannel marketing is an effective strategy.
The growing number of marketers adopting multichannel marketing strategies shows the importance of meeting consumers across multiple platforms. Multichannel marketing is important because these strategies can help your business:
- Find new customers
- Maintain interest from existing customers
- Gain an understanding of customer demographics
- Analyze customer interactions
- Focus spending and advertising budget
Since customers can now shop and consume content through a variety of channels, it’s important for businesses to have a multichannel marketing strategy in place in order to reach as many of their customers as possible. This strategy should be designed to meet the needs of each type of customer, whether they prefer to shop online, in brick-and-mortar stores, or scroll through social media streams.
Focusing your marketing strategy on multiple mediums will keep your business or service at the forefront of your customer’s minds. Your content, ads, and messaging will be seen by a whole new audience, and you will be able to approach customers in a variety of ways. This will remove any doubt or worry about being overlooked.
What Are the Main Marketing Channels?Â
Businesses today have a variety of marketing channels to choose from, each with its own advantages for reaching a particular audience. For example, a company providing B2B services might use LinkedIn to connect with decision-making executives and agents, while a fashion retailer might use Instagram or Pinterest to showcase styles.
While your marketing strategy may involve multiple channels, it is important to focus on the ones that will help you best reach your goals. Audience analysis can provide valuable insights into which channels are most effective for your business.
There are a few main marketing channels your business can use in a multichannel marketing strategy.
Digital Marketing Channels
This means that if you want to do business in 2021, you need to have a strong online presence. To do business in 2021, you need to have a strong online presence because that is where your customers are. Oberlo data shows that 3.9 billion people use email, and there are an estimated 3.5 billion Google searches per day, which adds up to 1.4 trillion searches per year.
Digital marketing channels can benefit your business by directing website visitors to your content, increasing brand awareness, and generating leads. Email newsletters can keep your customers updated on your latest products and services, while paid search ads can increase traffic to your website. Display ads can also help increase brand awareness and generate leads.
Social Marketing Channels
Social media provides opportunities for businesses to interact with consumers in a variety of ways. In 2020, 3.6 billion people around the world were using social media, and this is expected to grow to 4.41 billion by 2025.
There are many opportunities for businesses to connect with customers through social media marketing channels such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube. These platforms allow businesses to create targeted marketing campaigns by specifying the audience that sees their ads or content.
Broadcast Marketing Channels
Even though more people are cutting the cord, broadcast marketing channels are still a good option for businesses. Advertisers are expected to spend more than $65.7 billion on television advertising in 2021. Broadcast media is often localized and can be used to reach consumers in a specific geographic area or marketing, often with a far reach.
It’s important to think about more than just traditional television and radio when creating your broadcast marketing strategy. There are many other options available, such as streaming internet radio stations, podcasts, and more.
Print and Static Marketing Channels
Marketing channels that use printed or visual media to reach consumers include direct mail, flyers, billboards, magazine ads, newspaper ads, and brochures. These are proven channels, as more than 70% of all individuals read newspapers regularly.
Print and static marketing channels might be able to reach consumers in ways that digital platforms cannot. Print advertising can be targeted to reach a specific demographic. However, it might be difficult to personalize content and analyze user data from print campaigns.
Drawbacks to Multi-Channel Marketing
Multi-channel marketing refers to a marketing strategy that uses multiple channels to reach potential customers. These channels can include traditional channels like television and radio, as well as digital channels like social media and email. One of the main benefits of multi-channel marketing is that it allows businesses to reach a larger audience. By using multiple channels, businesses can reach people who might not be exposed to their product or service through just one channel. However, multi-channel marketing can also be more expensive and time-consuming than other marketing strategies. Businesses need to create separate marketing materials for each channel, and they also need to track the performance of each channel to see which one is most effective.
The result is a scattered and less effective brand. Another concern is that if not managed correctly, your brand can become very complex very quickly. With all of the touchpoints involved, it can become increasingly difficult to maintain a consistent tone and message for all of them. The result is a scattered and less effective brand.
The main issue with multi-channel marketing is that it can be very time-consuming and expensive. Many businesses don’t have the budget or the manpower to implement it effectively.
Multi-channel marketing can be a lot of work for a business, but if they have the right tools and strategy it can be worth it.
How to Build a Multi-Channel Marketing Strategy
Despite the fact that most marketers realize that multi-channel marketing is important, only 73% have a corresponding strategy. Now that you understand multi-channel marketing better, let’s discuss how you can develop an effective strategy.
Establish the Goal of Your Strategy
If you don’t have a goal for your marketing strategy, it’s not really a strategy. It’s just a bunch of disconnected marketing efforts. The first step in creating an effective multi-channel marketing strategy is to figure out what you want to achieve.
What is the main message of your marketing strategy? How will you make sure your message stands out from the competition on any given channel?
Ultimately, your strategy’s goals should serve to accomplish several things:
- Creating a strong brand personality that stands out from your competitors.
- Promoting your USP (unique selling proposition) centered around your business offering.
- Hitting your desired KPIs (key performance indicators).
Your marketing efforts should be true to your main goal and consistent across all channels. Your tone and personality should carry over to all channels, with slight variation. Your messaging should ultimately serve the same purpose: spreading awareness of your USP and converting. Without a clear goal, your strategy may be disorganized and ineffective.
Find and Flesh Out Your Buyer Persona
You should keep your end consumer in mind throughout your multi-channel marketing efforts. You won’t be able to create an effective strategy without first understanding your buyer persona.
What is a buyer persona? It’s a fictional representation of your ideal customer that combines background information, demographics, characteristics, motivations, pain points, and more to create a full picture of who your campaign is targeting. In multi-channel marketing, the channels that your buyer persona prefers is the most important information.
You can create a buyer persona in a variety of ways:
- Communicate with existing customers.
- Send out surveys to site users.
- Monitor user activity on your site and external channels.
- Collect user data.
There are many different tools, such as Google Analytics, that can help you create an accurate buyer persona. By tracking data on your website’s traffic, you can figure out where the majority of your traffic is coming from. Doing this can give you an understanding of where your customers are located and which channels they use most frequently.
Decide on the Channels You Want to Market On
Over half of all companies surveyed use at least eight channels to engage with their customers, a number which may seem large but could be necessary for an effective strategy.
The goal of multi-channel marketing is not to market on every channel, which would be a waste of time and money.
You will be most successful in your marketing efforts if you focus on the channels that will best reach your intended audience. The best way to determine which channels to use is to understand your buyer persona. Knowing the demographics of your user base will give you insight into their buying habits.
Different channels have different audiences. For example, Facebook’s audience is older than TikTok’s, which is mainly used by Generation Z. If your target audience is a B2B customer in their late 40s, TikTok may not be the right channel for you, and LinkedIn might be a better choice.
The content you need to create will vary depending on the social media platform you choose. For example, if you’re using YouTube or TikTok, you’ll need to create videos that are optimized for those platforms. However, if you’re using Facebook or LinkedIn, you’ll need to create different types of content that are optimized for those platforms.