Creating and implementing a multichannel marketing strategy can increase the likelihood of your content being seen, by reaching customers where they pay the most attention and show the most engagement, whether through email, web, social, or ads.
This impactful sales approach provides customers a fully integrated shopping experience and, as marketing experts are fully aware, that can lead to positive brand image and higher retention rates. Whether the customer is interacting with a brand on social media, shopping on their mobile device, or simply browsing in a brick-and-mortar store, their experience should be consistent and seamless.
Creating a working multi-channel marketing strategy requires some creativity, but is by no means impossible. Here are 4 tips to help marketers create a winning multi-channel marketing strategy.
Focus on the Customer
Keeping the strategy focused on the customer helps to ensure an overall positive brand experience, regardless of the platform used. Customers desire to feel a personal connection with the brands they use on a regular basis. By focusing on their wants and needs, marketers can develop messaging, recommendations, and sales strategies that will resonate with their customer base.
The most effective multi-channel marketing strategies also work to ensure their customers receive that same positive experience and messaging through each and every channel, and that means brands should not send the same marketing messages across all mediums. Audience segmentation is a crucial step to making sure the right message is delivered at the right time, to the right platform, for the biggest impact.
Overall, the most successful multi-channel marketing strategies combine highly personalized messaging across email, text messages, and social media, into one seamlessly cohesive marketing campaign.
Leverage Automation
Many marketing experts would read that last line and think, “there aren’t enough hours in the day to manage multiple audience messages, across multiple channels, and still have time to be strategic.” And they would be right. The answer to that, and the keystone of the most successful multi-channel marketing strategies, is automation.
From one location, marketing teams can manage all campaign aspects across multiple channels and platforms at critical points throughout the consumer lifecycle. They can schedule multiple communications across each channel, allowing for the segmentation required to maintain adequate personalization. By relieving teams of the manual labor required for this level of execution, marketing automation solutions can mean freeing up time to focus on big picture strategies.
Use the Data
Collecting data for each channel, analyzing and then optimizing its use, caters to a successful multi-channel approach. Analyzing where customers are clicking on email, social, or other platforms, and optimizing accordingly and regularly, is vital.
Collecting this data and forming unified user profiles allows for the all-important personalization needed to inform the larger strategy. Continuously testing different messaging, incentives, and other content can help to focus on what the unified profiles respond to best.
Once that information is collected, marketing teams can then work to eliminate any possible pain points in the customer purchasing process, as well as target those customers for loyalty programs, win-back strategies, multi-step campaigns, and retargeting programs.
Final Thoughts
Automation solutions, like those mentioned above, can work to collect that very user data to develop unique profiles for marketers. To be successful when using multi-channel strategies, the software is only one part of the strategy, it won’t do the whole job.
To truly win in multi-channel marketing requires the combination of technology, data, and trends with a marketer’s innate creativity and knowledge of their customer base. By keeping the focus on the customer, and using marketing automation to tactically execute on the data-driven strategy, B2C marketers can excel across multiple channels.
To learn more about how e-commerce and brand marketers should view multi-channel marketing, download our whitepaper, “Omnichannel Marketing Automation.”
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