In today’s marketing landscape, businesses can’t afford to put all their eggs in just one basket. With consumer attention divided among a bewildering amount of online and traditional platforms, marketing efforts must be diversified and meet prospects where they spend their time.
Multichannel marketing engages shoppers across multiple mediums to expand businesses’ reach, enhance consumer interaction, and ultimately, increase revenue. When partnered with proper analytics and continuous campaign refinement, this marketing approach allows businesses to become more efficient and effective with their marketing investments.
What is Multichannel Marketing?
As consumers, we have the choice of numerous platforms when seeking information or simply entertainment. These options aren’t mutually exclusive either. For example, a person could watch a TV news program in the morning, but catch up on headlines during the day through social media. When factoring in preference of specific TV network and social platform in this basic example and multiplying by a community of unique individuals, it can be dizzying for businesses competing for attention.
To this end, multichannel marketing utilizes a strategic combination of outlets to broaden a business’s reach and engage consumers on their preferred platforms. These channels often mix traditional and digital media, including social media, websites, broadcast and print media, and in-store marketing. Each business’s ideal marketing mix is unique and largely depends on its target audiences.
Benefits of Multichannel Marketing
While juggling multiple channels requires incremental effort and investment, the benefits are numerous. Considering most buyer’s journeys occur over time and in multiple stages, businesses can generate stronger brand awareness and conversion rates by engaging prospects at touchpoints across multiple outlets. In addition to broadened reach, multichannel marketing also improves customer experience by allowing them to interact with your brand conveniently on their preferred platforms.
As social media platforms’ popularity tends to recede over time and even some traditional channels face obsolescence, presence on multiple channels also hedges your business from losing connection with your audience if a particular platform dissolves or unjustly bans your account.
Best Practices for Multichannel Marketing
- Start Small: Review your current marketing channels and gauge how many more your bandwidth and budget can realistically support. After identifying new potential outlets and prioritizing them based on expected value, begin by adding just a few new channels and evaluating the results.
- Platforms like Google Ads are common in most marketing plans because they enable advertising on Google’s search engine, network of 2M+ websites/apps, and YouTube – all from one dashboard.
- Stay Consistent: Maintain consistent messaging (including any sales or offers) across each platform. While you can tailor messages and content to each platform’s strengths, your brand should have a cohesive voice across the board.
- Cross-Promote: Don’t be afraid to promote your brand’s content or general presence on other networks. For example, including links to your social media profiles in your email newsletter can build your accounts’ follower bases and strengthen overall engagement with customers.
- Measure Results & Continuously Refine: Multichannel marketing is only as effective as your ability to measure each channel’s results and tune your investment to the unique mix providing the best value for your business. Be mindful that this is a moving target over time which requires continuous monitoring and refinement.
Summary
Multichannel marketing provides numerous benefits to brands seeking to scale their business. Though requiring incremental effort and investment, a broadened network of marketing channels strengthens brand visibility, prospect engagement, and customer conversion.
Assess your strategies and resources to determine how you can capitalize on multichannel marketing to grow your business. If outsourcing these ongoing efforts to a qualified marketing firm is appealing, learn more about choosing a marketing agency in one of our most popular articles.
