cross channel marketing

Are you cross-channel marketing? If not, you should.

Marketing is all about the ROAS (return on ad-spend), right?

Wrong.

It’s about the customer.  If you provide your customers with a consistent experience on any marketing channel, you’re moving in the right direction.  But the reality is that this isn’t happening, and it’s costing businesses revenue opportunity.

WHAT IS CROSS-CHANNEL MARKETING?

Basically, cross-channel marketing (CCM) is the strategy of deploying a holistic marketing strategy on multiple marketing channels that provides your customer a consistent experience no matter where they’re looking.

This is different from “Multi-Channel Marketing”, which is marketing on as many channels as possible to gain the largest reach.  CCM incorporates the strategy customer experience, which requires the different marketing channels to be married together in some way to provide one cohesive marketing strategy.

WHY IS CROSS-CHANNEL MARKETING IMPORTANT?

Besides providing your customers a better experience (which they’ll thank you for), it provides you lots of meaty insights that you can use to further optimize your campaign.  CCM leads to much more customer engagement because you’re streamlining their experience and personalization with your brand.

It also gives you a much better idea of your customer’s buying journey because you’re able to follow them through their journey process through personalized marketing message and incentives.

This information is metric-tons of gold in determining what is working within your customer’s buying journey and what’s not so you can optimize your customer’s buying experience.  Additionally, it increases your brand awareness and customer loyalty by tunneling your way through the thousands of ads you customers see per day to the top of the pack.

HOW DO YOU START SETTING UP A CROSS-CHANNEL MARKETING CAMPAIGN?

CCM is awesome stuff, but it can be a bit complicated.  It’s important first and foremost that you understand your marketing goals and objectives.

I know, I know – of course you know your goals and objectives. But do you? When’s the last time you’ve really assessed your plan? If it’s been more than three-months, sit down and re-assess.  Make sure your goals are specific and measurable, relevant, and assigned a timeframe.

Next, you’ll need to understand your audience and segment them demographically, geographically, technographically (how someone uses technology), and psychographically (the unconscious or conscious beliefs, motivations, etc.).  But be sure that you have a good understanding of your target audience, otherwise you won’t be able to segment properly. After segmenting, now you can think about what specific messages make the most sense for each audience segment to maximize conversions.

MISTAKES TO AVOID

  • Running the same offers on every channel. That just kind of defeats the purpose of all the work you did in setting up a cross-channel marketing campaign.  Serve offers and messages based on the audience segment you’re targeting.
  • Having the same KPIs for each channel.  Each marketing channel works differently and needs to be treated as such.  Don’t expect to get post-campaign analytics from print advertising, though print advertising still is the most affordable and powerful marketing medium to reach a large audience for a reasonable price.
  • Being static with your budget.  As you learn more about how the campaign is performing, be open to shifting/adding budget to high-performing channels while pulling budget away from lower performing channels.  Marketers call this “optimizing” and it doesn’t happen enough in self-serve marketing efforts.  Case and point – when’s the last time you checked your Google Ads campaign to see how it’s doing?

If you’re interested in learning more about cross-channel marketing and how to effectively incorporate it into your marketing strategy, feel free to reach out to Kevin Berrier, Marketing Director at kberrier@mddcpress.com.