All business owners have one constant question lingering in their mind: “How can I expand my business to gain more clients, make more sales, and earn more profits?” If you are one of these business owners, then you have come to the right place for a piece of advice.
Maybe like most businessmen, you have only tried a few common and tested ways to market your brand. I am not saying that paid ads on Google, Social Media marketing, through Facebook and Instagram is not beneficial, but what I am trying to tell you is that they are simply not enough if you want to achieve your dreams.
Fortunately, the onset of technology and the internet has opened up a lot of doors for success and created a world of opportunity where all you have to do is take the first step and success will follow you. The long journey towards business excellence starts with multi-channel marketing
What is Multi-Channel Marketing?
Multi-channel marketing is a traditional way for brands to reach their customer base through several simultaneous modes of messaging or even by creating a free blog post for their customer base. In the past, multi-channel marketing referred to running marketing campaigns over radio, television, newspaper, and outdoor platforms. In today’s ecommerce market, it also refers to the various channels of online marketing that includes email, website banners, and social media advertising.
In order to market your brand in as many places as you can, the first thing you need to do is to identify which channels of marketing are available.
Channels Available to Market Your Business
- Mobile
There are almost 3 billion smartphone users in the world and nearly 80% of people who use the internet also use a smartphone. Including mobile marketing in your business growth strategy is not a choice but more like a necessity nowadays.
If your business has a website, it should be mobile responsive and optimized aka mobile app development must have to fit into any of mobile device so that customers can engage with your services and products through the ease of their mobile phones. You can use mobile phone services to send SMS text messages, updates, and coupons regarding your company’s products and services.
- Events
Marketing events and trade shows are an excellent way to connect with an audience on a personal level. Whether you are a multinational firm or a small business, creating awareness about your product through these events will attract more customers and give a chance to the existing ones to interact with you.
- Online Marketplaces
In addition to creating a website to showcase and sell your products, you can use famous marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay for marketing your products. There are almost a million people searching for products on these platforms and it can be huge burst in your revenue.
- Direct Mail
One of the most effective ways to attract customers is through direct mail. Direct mail is a very cost-effective method to send ads, coupons or information about your product directly to the customer’s home or mailbox
- Print Ads
While most people think that print media is dead, they are simply not using it the right way. Print ads have the capability to target and attract a huge audience only if you know which newspaper or magazine to use.
The cost associated with promoting your business through print media is very inexpensive. Depending upon your budget and needs you can target a local or international audience.
Why Is Multi-Channel Marketing Important?
The power of multi-channel marketing is that it creates an omnipresent image for your company’s brand. That coverage maximizes the opportunity for potential customers to discover your products and services when they need them.
It is clearly beneficial for so many reasons, but inherently, it boils down to the core advantage of exposing your business to audiences regardless of their demography. Services such as Unified Communication are providing businesses with the opportunity to take their productivity to the next level by enhancing their marketing campaigns. Head over to Unified Communication and learn more about how you can integrate your business into a singular, unified way of communication.
Ways to Make Multi-Channel Marketing Work for Your Business
There are a few principles to follow when formulating a modern multi-channel marketing strategy to ensure that it’s effective. In this article, I’ll summarize ten ways to make multi-channel marketing work for your company or brand.
1.Channel Focused Marketing
Multi-Channeling gives you the option to be anywhere, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to give your business unwarranted exposure. But if you would like to widen the exposure you want for your business, you can always check this facebook advertising agencies list to guide you further. Before you choose a channel for your business growth, define what it means for your business and spend money on it accordingly.
Exposing your business to an audience is not as important as exposing it to potential customers. Every channel you choose must not only have an ample audience, but that channel should be coherent with your business model, industry and the people you want to target.
Facebook has the most number of users than any other network. However, if your marketing strategy is more image and graphic-based, it won’t prove to be as effective on Facebook as it would be on Instagram.
LinkedIn and Facebook marketing provides the best chance of success if you want to conduct business-to-business transactions as they register the most number of official media accounts of businesses and startups.
You can narrow down your target audience by a few simple steps.
- Where does the customer live?
- What age group is he from?
- What is their income range?
- What is their education level?
- What is the pain points that attract them?
By finding the answers to these questions, you will be able to come up with a better marketing strategy and target the platforms on which the audience is more likely to pay attention to the message you are trying to convey..
2.Understanding the Customer’s Journey
The digital age of marketing has changed the way people conduct business. In olden times, when a person needed to buy something, they would go to the local store. The salesperson at the store would reach out, and tell about the available options, features of the sold product and compare prices with similar products.
Insightful research is well-built tactic for deriving any decisions. So, you have to keep customer’s experience in mind while road-mapping any marketing strategies, it includes three basic phases for designing customer’s journey so far:
- Awareness
The awareness stage of a customer’s journey is where they have realized the need to buy something. At this stage, they are looking at every aspect of the desired product and learning about it.
You need to educate your customer to identify the problems regarding their product and open a whole area of opportunity to them. They will need blogs, content, eBooks, and research reports and you must provide them with neutral third-party opinions.
- Consideration
During the consideration phase of the journey, the customer identifies the issue and looks for solutions to overcome the identified problem. The customer, at this stage, will look for as much material as they can find to solve the issue.
They will turn to white papers, events, podcasts, videos or anything that will help them identify potential solutions to their problems.
- Decision
The last step in the buyer’s journey is the decision phase. At this stage, the customer will decide on a solution or to take on a new opportunity based on the research.
Live demos or free trials can go a long way to make the customer come to a decision that your product is right one for them and there’s no better product in the market.
A marketing approach that assists a customer in all these stages, across all channels, will attract a large sum of audience. Since your website is the key platform for guiding a customer, it is important that you optimize it for each step of a buyer’s journey.
3.Customer-Centered Marketing
Multi-channel marketing can amplify effective messaging and create larger gains in sales than with single-channel campaigns. It can also amplify poor messaging that will damage your brand. It’s important to pay attention to customer feedback and incorporate it into your messaging. When a message falls flat and garners negative feedback, discontinue it and replace it with new messaging that dovetails with your customers’ feedback
By the same token, it’s important to monitor how well your marketing campaign is targeting the segment of the market that’s most interested in your business. If one channel is more efficient at reaching those people, then it’s wise to emphasize it over others that aren’t converting as many leads. You can make a multi-channel strategy more effective and correct poor messaging quickly by staying focused on customer response.
Most effective multi-channel marketing strategies make sure that the customers experience the same positive experience throughout each and every channel. It is also imperative that the same message is not sent over different channels which will result in poor branding.
Along with marketing segmentation, audience segmentation is also very crucial to make sure that the right message gets delivered to the right channel at the right time.
4. Creating a Consistent Marketing Message
You’ll have more success when you present the brand to all its potential customers in a consistent way. Individuals in your audience will likely be exposed to messaging on two or more channels in today’s hyper-connected world.
They may see a billboard ad during a morning commute, swipe by a social media message during the workday, and receive a marketing email at the end of their day. These messages need to form a coherent image to make your brand effective and memorable.
Each channel of a multi-channel marketing campaign is a unique medium that forces messaging to be customized, but it’s important to make your messaging identifiable across channels. Logos, common color schemes, mottos and slogans, and shared background images can make messages in diverse mediums instantly recognizable as part of your brand.
Now, this doesn’t mean that you have to replicate similar content across each channel. There needs to be a discrepancy of content, and you need to analyze what kind of message works best on each channel and come with a distinguished yet a resonating message for all channels.
To achieve this, each channel’s campaign manager needs to collaborate with the overall marketing strategist and agree on the basic format for their messaging.
5. Recognizing the Full Range of Customer Value
Powerful and effective marketing strategy depends on shared links, posting positive reviews along with engaging over multiple social profiles. Relying upon such activities will directly convert potential lead and more conversions. The best marketing messages come from customers recommending your products and services to their family, friends, and business partners.
When building a website for your business, remember to put in a customer testimonial and feedback section. Positive reviews in this section will help new customers to make a decision, and the positive feedback of your brand will impact anyone who comes to your website.
Whether they are social media influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers or ordinary people with a few hundred, the buzz they generate can be more effective than millions of dollars’ worth of television ads.
A modern multi-channel marketing campaign will aim to give these brand advocates material to share with their friends. A combination of well-placed SEO content, social media viral posts, and email campaigns with clear calls to action will mobilize your customers to convert new customers for you.
6. Use Software to Target Prospects
Technology has not only provided different channels to carry out marketing, but it is also powering businesses to keep up with different interactions across these channels through Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.
At the most fundamental level, CRM software allows you to manage your business relationships and organize the data across several channels. CRM software greatly enhances the operational visibility of a business through a comprehensive overview of sales.
A CRM software will also allow you to keep track of your partnerships, potential sale opportunities, and customer information through each and every channel. With this, you can pinpoint events that lead to a sale and understand how the customer is moving through every channel.
When a customer responds to a certain channel, the CRM immediately record that interaction and creates a user profile. This profile is updated whenever that user interacts with the channel again, creating a history of his engagement with the brand.
CRM also helps you to identify loyal and long-term customers. You can reward these customers with discounts and coupons, and they will create a better image of your brand in their social circle. This will, in turn, attract more customers and increase your revenue.
7. Leverage Customer Behavior Data
Another innovation that has made modern marketing campaigns more successful is targeting customers based on their online activity. By tracking a potential customer’s web surfing, you can make specific suggestions to individual leads after they leave your website through banner networks and social media ads.
Customer data that’s stored in accounts or profiles with your own company can be combined with tracking data gleaned from other sources to create targeted messaging that’s personalized to each viewer.
The power of automation and artificial intelligence makes personalized marketing messages possible that weren’t in the past. Campaigns today can be designed to customize messaging for each member of your audience with real-time data analysis.
Automation also gives the marketing team the option to manage all the campaigns across multiple channels and platforms from one location. By scheduling the communication across these channels, you can relieve teams of manual labor required to carry it out and free them up to do more important tasks.
8. Use Re-Marketing Technique Across All Channels
Dynamic remarketing techniques enables you to show products and service ads to customers who have already visited your website before or have already interacted with your channel. Special tailored messages for the buyer behavior are presented to them for products they have viewed which leads to a higher conversion rate and lower cart abandonment rate.
When a person comes across a website, his initial experience of the product or the service may not be enough from his to make a decision and convert him into a buyer. That’s where remarketing comes in as it gives them an opportunity to interact with the product again and make up their mind for finally buying the item.
Depending upon which platform you are using, you can add remarketing ads to all pages of your websites and social media accounts. These ad platforms keep the cookies of each visitor in their database and assign an ID with it. As soon as the visitor with an already existing ID comes back to the website, he is presented with the remarketed ad.
Likewise, you can also use email marketing software to retarget emails. Using this technique, you can remind customers about sales, new discounts, coupons on the products they have looked for on your website.
9.Creating Seamless Online Customer Experiences
Customers increasingly expect a hassle-free experience when they interact with businesses. One way to achieve that is to integrate the technologies that they use every day like the internet and mobile devices
Websites should be designed to work equally well on smartphones and desktop computers. Customer service departments should be accessible through chat, social media accounts, and messaging services as well as telephone calls.
When a customer’s online experience moving between social media posts, website order pages, shopping carts, and email confirmations forms a seamless experience, it creates a positive impression of your brand overall.
You can achieve this by integrating your marketing and service platforms with the unified communications services offered by many VoIP providers. A unified communications platform makes it possible to combine social media channels, AI, and other digital technologies with voice calls. It will give your sales and marketing staff tools to interact efficiently with your customers through multiple communication channels.
10. Integrate Online and Brick-and-Mortar Venues
Some businesses start out a brick and mortar enterprise as a local shop and slowly grow into the digital world, whereas others launch online and evolve into a physical store. Simply put, a click and mortar business is an integrated model that combines both online and offline operations.
Until recently, marketing campaigns have been divided into online and offline formats. Online campaigns focus on driving ecommerce traffic to websites and building your brand with customers using search engines and social media.
Offline campaigns have focused on billboards, TV, and radio advertising to drive sales at physical stores. The days when people could be divided into separate online and offline markets are coming to an end. Most consumers today have integrated the internet with their brick-and-mortar shopping, using smartphones to compare prices and research products.
Businesses have realized this new reality and begun to integrate their online and offline marketing campaigns with digital and brick-and-mortar messaging. Sales associates increasingly carry tablets, and customers can order products that aren’t in a store at computer kiosks.
Treating the e-commerce and physical store sides of a retail business as complementary rather than competitive is proving to be an effective strategy. Marketing campaigns should do the same to create an integrated brand that includes both ways of interacting with your business.
Conclusion
Multi-channel marketing continues to be the best way to maximize your brand’s exposure to potential customers and win over current customers as brand advocates. The combination of online and offline channels of advertising and a consistent messaging format will make any campaign more effective.
Nimble messaging that’s responsive to customer feedback and reactions will also protect your brand against poor messaging. Customer-centric approach will always leads you to win marketing-battle and helps for getting optimum results.
Do your research and analyze what channels are best for your brand. It’s important to keep your brand active throughout all these channels and to integrate them as it will do wonders for your business. Following these simple steps will definitely turn visitors into customers and make your business grow exponentially.
