You’ve likely landed on this page armed with the knowledge that the marketing landscape has shifted significantly in recent years, changing how you interact with customers on a grand scale. Consumers have become savvy to advertising campaigns and marketing techniques, forcing businesses to become creative and forward thinking in how they instigate meaningful conversations with potential customers. We are here to tell you that one of the most effective methods to achieving this, is to utilise multi-channel marketing.

What is Multi-Channel Marketing?

Multi-channel marketing, is the practice of using a number of both direct and indirect communication methods in order to engage with your customers. This can be through television advertisements, social media, emails, texts, SEO and Google ads. Multi-channel marketing provides your potential customers with an essential aspect of the buying process - choice.

Its 2018, your customers can easily choose when, where and through which device they consume information and buy your products or services. As much as we hate to admit it, customers have far more control over the buying process than marketers do. By utilising a multi-channel marketing approach, you’re giving your customers the choice of what platform they choose to read about your latest offering and buy your products.

Now, if you’ve gotten this far into our blog post and are convinced that a single channel marketing approach has been successful and saved you time and money… But, did you know that multi-channel customers spend three to four times more than single marketing customers? That’s a whole lot of return on investment...

Here’s our Tops Tips to Running a Successful Multi-Channel Marketing Campaign.

Know Your Customer

As obvious as this may seem, it’s one of the biggest downfalls of most multi-channel marketing campaigns. In most instances, businesses have an idea of who they’re target market is, without any solid evidence. Your campaign needs to take a targeted approach in order for it to be a success - don’t leave this to chance! Sit down with your team and complete a customer mapping exercise so you can effectively target your customers throughout the buying buying process.  

Set Your Tone

The second biggest downfall of multi-channel marketing strategies is a disjointed campaign. Yes, we understand that to target customers across different platforms you need to tweak your message slightly. But you can’t convey yourself as an “out there” clothing label on Instagram and still attempt to promote work wear to professionals on LinkedIn. Consumers prefer transparency - so although you’ll need to accommodate your message for each platform, remember they should complement each other and work to achieve the same business goal.  

Landing Page

This is where it’s time to put yourself in your customers shoes… how many times have you clicked on an advertisement that’s taken you to a page that’s totally irrelevant to the ad you’ve just seen? Your campaign can’t be deceiving or “click bait” in order to get traffic to your site. Not only will this frustrate your customer, it can have a negative impact on your site as a whole. A high bounce rate is terrible for SEO and can result in your site’s visibility dropping. If you’re running an AdWords campaign and your landing page isn’t relevant - you’ll likely be placing a higher bid than your competitors for the same keywords or risk receiving a penalty. Make your landing page eye catching, keyword rich and most importantly - relevant. Point all of your marketing channels to the same landing page - be it through social media, AdWords or even a flier! By using the same landing page per campaign it’s easier to analyse which channel brings in the most revenue, making it easier to justify changes in the future.

Cross-Channel Recognition

Encourage your users to connect with your platforms other! Make sure you do this in a way that your customer will see as beneficial rather than bombarding them with “follow us” posts, these aren’t insightful and won’t drive revenue. Add pop ups to your landing pages offering a 20% discount code or a free introductory service if they sign up to your newsletter. Planning to run a competition on Facebook? Why not ask them to share the post on their instagram story and tag your profile in it. Not only are you increasing your exposure to other potential customers, your encouraging your single channel customers to venture into new channels. That’s three to four times more likely to spend…

Event Tracking & Analytics

If you’ve gotten this far, please don’t stop reading! All aspects of campaigns require us marketers to understand consumer’s behaviours throughout the buying process and analytics is an essential aspect of this. To successfully run a multi-channel marketing campaign, we would recommend deploying event tracking across all platforms to ensure you can gain a comprehensive understanding of how your customers interact with your marketing materials and more importantly if they convert. If you’re using traditional marketing methods then consider adding a small discount so you can track their effectiveness, for example add code FLI10 at the checkout for 10% off. By utilising analytics correctly, you can easily track which channels are driving the biggest return on investment.

So, there you have it! An all-encompassing insight into multi-channel marketing and how to make your campaign succeed. Our team of digital marketers are highly passionate about this approach and have delivered fantastic results for our clients who have opted for a number of our digital marketing services. If you’d like to discuss a multi-channel marketing strategy - get in touch!