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What is Cross-Channel Marketing?
Markets are no longer product-driven today. It is the consumers that have the power to determine the direction marketers take to interact with their target audience.
A brand looking to create a personalized customer experience that strikes the right cord with its customers cannot afford to opt for a single-channel approach to marketing.
Single-channel marketing might be suited for ideal situations, but in reality, a business might lose a large chunk of its customer base. To capture the attention of your audience, a cross-channel approach to marketing is needed as it gives you the interconnectedness needed to meet your audience wherever they are and however they need it.
Cross-channel marketing refers to the method in which brands use multiple channels to connect and interact with their target audience. These channels work in tandem with each other and include all the touchpoints relevant to your target audience.
Benefits of Cross-Channel Marketing
Cross-channel marketing comes with many benefits, including:
- Integrating your marketing efforts across channels will help you identify touchpoints and create a clear marketing roadmap to convert leads and increase ROI.
- Marketing your brand across several channels helps to improve customer experience and loyalty, converting them into brand ambassadors.
- The increased brand trustworthiness has consumers coming back for your brand or service.
- Cross-channel marketing allows for better leveraging of data insights into the decision-making process.
- It allows a personalized approach to marketing which performs 202% better than generic ads or mailers.
- It provides better customer engagement and timely reach than single-channel marketing
Challenges of Cross-Channel Marketing
Cross-channel marketing comes with its own set of challenges as it looks beyond a simplified single-channel marketing approach. Formulating and implementing a cross-channel marketing campaign isn’t easy and would require in-depth research, selection, and adoption of multiple media channels.
Some of the challenges of cross-channel marketing include the following:
Getting to People at the Right Moment
Timing of the message and selection of the right media channels is crucial for the success of the cross-channel marketing campaign. 40% of marketers find it their biggest challenge to leverage strategies at the right timing of their marketing message.
Marketers often find it difficult to predict the best time and place to reach their target audience by displaying ads or sending emails. Another concern worth noting here is that media channels also undergo shifts in the user intent and marketing capabilities they have on offer.
Moreover, brands need to follow the best practices for each channel while they struggle to time their interactions on each channel.
Increasing Data Quality for Improved Insights
Data insights are relevant for businesses to identify patterns in consumer behavior and find ways to improve the efficiency of their marketing campaigns. While there is an ample amount of data, 42% of analytics professionals struggle with the quality of available data.
High-quality data is necessary for deriving accurate insights, which are then used to design personalized, comprehensive, and actionable marketing campaigns. Also, as the online world slowly moves towards a cookie-less future, brands need to reevaluate what kind of data they require and how they want to acquire it.
Choosing the appropriate advertising channels
A cross-channel marketing campaign requires an optimum mix of media channels. However, the selection of the right media channels and which channel covers what kind of target audience is a struggle in itself.
In the race to be visible and get your message across, the campaigns for different channels need to come together to form a unified effort toward the achievement of the set objective, whether it is generating impressions, capturing leads, or improving engagement.
Understanding your consumer on a granular level and using the channels synergistically to fill in the gaps can go a long way in building a great cross-channel strategy.
Making the Right Marketing Attribution Choices
Only 21% of marketers consider deploying and using a marketing attribution model in their campaigns. Most of the time, marketers consider the wrong metrics while determining their cross-channel marketing strategy. For instance, when a marketer tracks the click-through rate, they discount other metrics and neglect the percentage of people who saw the ad but didn’t click on it.
Also, attribution models such as Media Mix Modeling (MMM) and Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) have limitations as they cannot be combined together to provide a holistic view of marketing campaigns.
Why Your Company Should Use Cross-Channel Marketing?
What lies behind a well-directed marketing strategy that invokes interest and generates leads? It is the understanding and know-how about your target audience or target persona, to be precise.
It is essential to know who you are marketing to, what are their needs and preferences, what demographics they belong to, what media channels they use, etc. Going for a generic consumer persona won’t land your efforts anywhere, especially in this age where customers undergo constant exposure to ads.
You are competing for the same attention span as your competitors, making it even more pertinent to understand how your target audience prefers to interact with brands and make buying decisions.
Cross-channel marketing helps to leverage data insights and come up with a unified setup to help increase engagement, build customer loyalty, and improve ROI.
Better Engagement
Customer engagement is a direct function of a brand’s effort to grab the attention of its customers. How many times have you scrolled without looking at the ad or pressed on Skip Ad irritably?
In today’s time, when the advertisement market is highly saturated, only quality content personalized to woo a specific target persona can help to yield results for your marketing campaigns. Cross-channel marketing helps build personalized content and align CTAs to your marketing goals and consumer preferences for better results.
More devoted clients
Customer loyalty makes customers return back for your brand again and again, make your brand the go-to source for a given set of issues, and even recommend your brand to other customers by becoming its informal brand ambassadors.
A cross-channel marketing strategy, along with good customer support, can bring delight to your clients and make them loyal purchasers. Instead of researching, comparing, and testing solutions for a new and possibly cheaper product, the customers prefer to upgrade or purchase additional services from you if they are satisfied and happy.
Guaranteed ROI
Most of the metrics that marketers use to measure the success of their marketing efforts cannot be combined. Your efforts, combined with a cross-channel marketing strategy, may help break down the silos in your campaign that are the culprit behind decontextualizing the metrics.
Instead of multiple channels like the website, social media campaigns, or email marketing jumping in to claim their role and push their vanity metrics, all the channels come together to map touchpoints and form a clear roadmap of the marketing efforts. This helps to refine and realign your marketing efforts.
People also read – Omnichannel Marketing: Complete Guide for 2023
Steps On How to Create an Effective Cross-Channel Marketing Campaign
Till now, we focused on cross-channel marketing, its benefits, and challenges. But we need to remember that cross-channel marketing is not a one-time effort but a continued stint of improvements until the best blend is achieved.
Here’s a step-by-step process to launch a cross-channel marketing campaign for your own brand:
Organize your Data
The first step of any marketing effort should be defining the customer persona. In a cross-channel marketing campaign, once you have developed your personal, the next step is to have unified data within a customer data platform or CDP.
The customer relationship management platform sufficiently manages this data, and you can start by building off the tools that already exist in your arsenal. Take care to have data analytics for each touchpoint to capture your leads well.
This may involve using the data captured by browser cookies to assess the actions associated with each individual lead, including their PPC clicks, blog reads, social media impressions, etc.
Make your customer segments clear
The second step is to understand the different segments within the customer persona. Most of the time, your CDP will suffice to create meaningful reports to help you visualize and understand data points.
Next, try to identify trends in your successes or failures, such as the commonalities between the leads you have already converted, the number of interactions you spent on each lead, or the campaign that had the highest conversion rate.
This analysis would help create a clear picture in your mind on which channels to prioritize and the kind of content that performs best for each channel.
Establish clear customer segments
Once you have shortlisted the segments and the kind of content you want to work with for each channel, the next marketing effort would be focused on personalizing the content. This is easier done when your CDP is integrated with your CRM.
To begin customizing your content, make sure your data is unified within your CDP. Use smart content – a strategy that says, ‘if a viewer has done this, show them that.’ By utilizing smart content, you are able to use dynamic concepts to clearly identify customer actions and develop subsequent interactions based on that.
Focus on building quality content over more content. Use the type of content that goes well with your audience. For example, videos are preferred by 59% of marketers.
Optimize, then repeat the process
Use cross-channel marketing to report on and find ways in which strategies for one channel can bring out the best in another. By doing so, you are able to find, analyze and fill in the gaps in your marketing strategy. You can also find valuable insights to determine the ROI for your marketing efforts.
Further, optimize your efforts by finding ways to integrate ongoing optimizations for your cross-channel marketing campaigns and make them more productive.
The data captured can be used to conduct experiments like adjusting the audience traits for Facebook ads or finding ways to align CTAs better.
Making Use of the Proper Marketing Technologies
Finally, when you have zeroed in on the best strategies that work for your cross-channel marketing campaign, you can leverage the strategies to unify customer data, collect insights, and execute powerful marketing strategies.
This also means that you can now cater your marketing efforts for sales, marketing, or service interaction related to each of your contacts. With the right toolset and data insights in your hand, you are ready to delight your customers and achieve the unachievable in your marketing campaign.
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Examples of Brands Using Cross-Channel Marketing
Cross-channel marketing does not only realign your marketing efforts in the present, but also provides useful data insights and actionable tips to better understand your customers while designing future campaigns. While there are many brands doing commendable work in the cross-channel marketing space, let’s study the examples of two brands that use cross-channel marketing to their advantage and become successful.
Mercedes Benz Using Cross-Channel Marketing
Mercedes Benz used a combination of digital and offline methods for its CLA product launch. The company considers it to be the best product launch in 20 years. To execute the campaign, the company used research from their Generation Benz online community.
They created and executed a super bowl ad with Usher and Kate Upton for the CLA launch during the Super Bowl, which was hosted at a Mercedes-sponsored stadium.
Some other marketing efforts that the company performed for this launch included:
- Building a microsite for their product
- Buying Facebook ads
- Creating the hashtag #clatakethewheel
- Partnering up with popular Instagram photographers and YouTube personalities like Casey Neistat.
The campaign resulted in Mercedes garnering 85 million organic impressions and 2 million likes, making the CLA model sales single-handedly responsible for the 14% sales gain in November.
Starbucks Using Cross-Channel Marketing
Starbucks used a combination of offline and online experiences via its app. It also used a reinforcement learning platform to reward users for their purchases. The app also offered personalized recommendations on users’ shopping habits.
Additionally, the users got push notifications for other promotions and sales antics Starbucks was undertaking to bring more traffic. Starbucks provides an integrated experience to its customers and effectively meets them wherever they are.
How will cross-channel marketing advance in the future?
Cross-channel marketing will use artificial intelligence and machine learning to reinforce the next wave in marketing and moving customers.
Already a lot of AI components are being woven into the technology of rings that better produce and respond to customers in real-time. The future will improve and build upon these components.
Conclusion
Organizations today can use advanced solutions to create a consistent customer journey across all the marketing plans under their cross-channel marketing strategy.
Cross-channel marketing allows continuous monitoring and content alignment at every touch point so that customers have a cohesive experience that increases engagement and drives brand loyalty.
