How to Launch and Run a Multi-Channel Marketing Campaign

To build brand loyalty in today’s competitive landscape, you need to make sure you’re everywhere your customers are.

A multi-channel marketing approach can help you craft the right message through your consumers’ preferred channels. You’ll understand specific marketing needs better, and your overall return on investment will likely increase as a result.

As shopping across different services continues to grow, businesses need to invest in multi-channel marketing campaigns to help their brands maximize exposure to their target audiences.

What Is Multi-Channel Marketing?

Multi-channel marketing refers to the use of different marketing channels to engage prospects and customers.

With 73% of consumers using multiple channels during the customer journey, multi-channel marketing is more important than ever. Most shoppers aren’t going through a single channel to make purchases anymore. They’re looking at various channels to ultimately make a decision about whether or not they want to buy a product or service.

With 73% of consumers using multiple channels during the customer journey, multi-channel marketing is more important than ever.

Multi-channel marketing refers to both online and offline channels. You can invest in email marketing and social media marketing (online), but you can also integrate traditional marketing efforts, like TV ads and direct mail (offline). It’s about creating more touchpoints with potential customers.

Multi-channel marketing is also distinct from omnichannel marketing. The former creates separate customer experiences through different channels, while the latter focuses on one unified customer experience using different channels.

The Benefits of Multi-Channel Marketing

Multi-channel marketing helps you increase brand exposure. It’s a pretty simple premise: your brand becomes more visible through a number of channels versus just one. People might see your brand online on a social network and offline on a billboard ad. The more places your brand appears, the more people will see it.

That exposure gives consumers more opportunities to engage and connect with your brand. You have the ability to reach users across a number of channels and get to consumers anytime and at any location: at work, at home, or even in social settings. You’re not limiting your marketing strategy to a single channel that can be accessed at only a specific part of a consumer’s day.

Multi-channel marketing also helps you cater to your buyer personas with more accuracy. Tailor your marketing efforts to reach potential customers on the channels of their choice. For consumers on smartphones and other mobile devices, you might invest in marketing through text messaging or apps. If your buyer persona is more traditional, targeting them through newspapers or magazines may be a better fit.

Research also shows multi-channel marketing often leads to more purchases. On average, multi-channel customers spend three to four times more than single-channel customers. Consumers who see ads on multiple channels also have a 24% higher conversion rate than those who see them via one channel.

Why is that? It may be because consumers on multiple channels are exposed to more products and services than single-channel customers are. In many cases, that exposure leads to consumers with high lead scores, who are close to being purchase-ready.

How to Implement a Multi-Channel Marketing Campaign in 3 Easy Steps
If you want to build a multi-channel marketing campaign for your business, you need to choose your channels, create channel-specific assets, and track your campaign performance.

Step 1: Choose Channels Based on Research

The first step of any multi-channel marketing strategy is to dig into research and metrics you already have. Start by looking at your customer data to see which channels have led to strong results in the past. You want to identify channels that have had a high ROI but also, and perhaps even more important, high customer engagement.

From there, find the most successful channels for each audience segment. Look for patterns to see what members of your target audience are going to certain channels. Are younger audience members in big cities on Instagram? Are older audience members in smaller cities on Facebook?

A great way to determine which channels to use is by implementing the Growth Share Matrix. This framework will allow you to break up your channels into four different growth categories to see which ones are worth investing and which ones you should avoid putting more marketing dollars into.

There’s no rule about the minimum number of channels you should use, but using four to six can help you get a manageable start.

Step 2: Create Channel-Specific Assets

You can’t create one ad and launch it across a variety of channels. Make sure all your content across different channels is unique and fits the particular channel you’re sharing it on.

Find out what types of content performs well on different channels. If you’re targeting consumers via Google ads, for example, you’ll want short and concise writing that immediately grabs a consumer’s attention. You don’t have the luxury of a lengthier blog explanation.

While you want to have a unified brand voice and tone, always keep in mind that each channel has its own quirks.

Depending on your budget, enlist a writer, graphic designer, and videographer to help create content across different channels. Your creative team should have the ability to write and design content for different channels and understand how they’re distinct.

Step 3: Track Campaign Performance Across Channels

Once your research and content are in place, you need to track your campaign performance. Choose an attribution model to determine which channels are most effective. These models can help uncover how customers are engaging within different channels and what actions they’re taking before converting.

Here are some common attribution models used by companies:

  • First-click attribution: Full credit goes to the first action a consumer took on their customer journey.
  • Last-click attribution: Full credit goes to the last action a consumer took on their journey to becoming a customer.
  • Linear attribution: Each action a consumer takes gets equal credit on their journey to becoming a customer.
  • Time-decay attribution: More credit is given to a consumer’s most recent actions.
  • Position-based attribution: More credit is given to consumer actions at different stages of the lead life cycle.

Whatever attribution model you choose, consider tracking customer data using customer relationship management (CRM) software.

Once you have all your customer data, you need to analyze it carefully. Look for trends in your marketing funnel to see what channels consumers are engaging with most.

Based on this information, reallocate your marketing budget accordingly for different channels based on your customer data. Content trends change rapidly, so stay on top of each channel to make sure you’re getting the most out of your ad spend.

Bonus Tip: Consider retargeting ads if you’re running a multi-channel marketing campaign. With this marketing tactic, you can retarget ads to other channels after users have left your website. The more channels you’re on, the more opportunity you’ll have to retarget ads to users.

Expand Your Reach with Multi-Channel Marketing

A lot of marketers have a tendency to view different marketing channels in silos. But for a multi-channel marketing campaign to be effective, you need to see channels as independently working toward the same goal of converting customer groups.

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