What is Multichannel Marketing?

Marketing is an integral part of every business. And every kind of marketing is working in particular situations. 

Today we will speak about multi-channel marketing and try to figure out, how does it work.

Let’s start with some theory. Multi-channel marketing is an interaction with your customer through direct and indirect ways of communication. It can be email distributions, websites, SMS, etc. That’s all made for a call to action. Simply put, it’s a call to sell. Customers should buy your product due to a certain channel of sales. If we summarize it, multi-channel marketing is about various possibilities to choose a more comfortable channel for sales and communication. 

Imagine that somebody needs a new smartphone. He will search for it in Google, Yandex, compare different devices, watch videos about them on YouTube, ask his friends which phones do they use. Also he has his routine. He checks emails, likes photos on Instagram, reads the news, blogs, feed-in Twitter or Facebook, posts something on forums… Let’s stop here. How many potential channels have we named? Here are the names. 

1. Google
2. Yandex
3. Instagram
4. Twitter
5. Facebook 
6. Youtube
7. Blogs
8. News sites

Wow, 8 channels for one person! Sounds amazing and interesting. Also, he can be a regular guest of Pinterest etc. It’s an everlasting list where potential customers can meet brands, trust us. 

And just think about the next thing. Who will sell the smartphone to this person? The company that placed their advertising on Google or a company that will place advertising, offer interesting emails about new products in the smartphone world and make an interesting interactive in their social media where people could win phones or some devices for them?

So, why is this kind of marketing so important and why do we pay so much attention to it?

It’s a simple question to answer. We need to understand that our product should be at that place, where our customers can be. And it’s not a secret that our potential audience can be everywhere. Nowadays we live in a century of information and there is lots of it. We get information from social media, news, billboards, videos, etc. And the other reason is that people who get information from various sources usually spend more money than people that prefer only one channel. Fun fact, isn’t it?

Customers create their own information space, and it seems like marketing specialists have nothing to do here. But it’s not true. Good marketing specialists should track new sources which give information to people. Just remember those days when mobile websites, target, and viral seemed like something unusual. This list of potential channels will grow and grow fast. Our main goal is to keep in touch with them. And get more touchpoints with potential audiences. 

Firstly, try to communicate with customers on their preferred channel. As we said, customers use lots of channels and instead of fair hope that people will find your product, just make it by yourself. Try to uncover and research channels that use your audience and meet them where they are. So, a customer who has a cursory interest in your product or service may want to receive expository advertisements on television, while a customer that is almost ready to purchase may want to read detailed reviews about your brand online.

Combine channels of marketing that are targeted to your audience. If you choose combined channels, it gives you the possibility to mix different kinds of advertising. It creates opportunities for more impactful messages. Like: 

• Social Media & Television – Nielsen Research found that campaigns with touchpoints across both television and Facebook experienced a 12 point lift in brand recall compared to campaigns that took place on a single channel. This is because social media helps reinforce marketing messages by reaching potential customers on a frequent, highly targeted basis.
• Radio & Television – Radio adverts are proven to help consumers remember television advertisements. When these two channels are combined, brand recall for television advertisements has been shown to improve by 35 percent. It is theorized that this effect occurs because it is very cost-effective to frequently expose consumers to short radio advertisements. Then, brands can solidify their image through more impactful and engaging television commercials. 

How to realize a strategy of multi-channel marketing. We have 3 keys to success.

1. Make audience’s portrait from different channels and mix all potential channels of work
2. Implement the platform of multi-channel marketing and choose relevant tools for it (by the way, we have a good article with useful tools for marketing, so you can check it following the link)
3. Collect holistic and consistent way researching information about the client by all your channels which will be used 

It’s very important to be clear about the customer. They get in touch with companies in different ways and if you understand and realize their actions in different places, you’ll analyze your audience better. So, to get this information in the best way, you need to collect a base of knowledge about customers. But remember, that gets a lot of info and understands the customer that’s not the same thing.

Also, you need to renew the info about people that would use your product. The world is very flexible and it changes too fast. That means that you need to improve your knowledge about customers, their needs, find new tools and touches. 

But don’t use too many channels. You can place a lot of advertising and touch the customer lots of times, but it would have no profit if you lose an understanding of which one of the channels works better for the customer. Many marketers have already adopted some kind of attribution model – a recent report found that 68% of marketers with an attribution strategy used Media Mix Modeling (MMM) while 49 percent used Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA). 

Customers don’t need to see your message. They need to feel important and feel it resonates with their values. That’s why it is so important to create your own strategy for messages according to different channels. Multi-channel messages should be based on a customer’s demographic, psychographic, and purchasing history while considering the channels that the customer frequents. This requires an in-depth, personalized approach to marketing. 

We deal with using multi-channel marketing. So now we need to sort out some problems with the analytics of this type of marketing. 

You can think that your marketing analytics work perfectly, but if you use a lot of channels, it can be fake. When creating multi-channel campaigns, 27%  of marketers found it challenging to leverage customer data, and 55 percent found it difficult to add customer data to existing customer profiles. Additionally, 65%of marketers are concerned with data quality, 

The data shows that it’s because of a lack of expertise in the organization. More than 20% of marketing specialists said that working with data was one of the most difficult tasks in their career.

Understand your audience. It’s recommended to gather more data about the target audience through extensive market research to create in-depth buyer personas that focus on small segments of your target audience.

Before starting the target, test the portrait of your future customer by campaign “test runs.” You’ll spend more time before the campaign, but the result would be better and you won’t need to find mistakes in an active advertising campaign. 

Multi-channel marketing is a great way to get a lot of audiences from different places. Just don’t forget that with great power comes great responsibility!