Multi-channel marketing
Today we'll explore multi-channel marketing vs omni-channel marketing, and 3 reasons why you should even bother with them.
What Are Marketing Channels?
Marketing channels are essential components in any company's promotional strategy. They are the different ways that businesses use to reach and communicate with customers. These channels include both online (social media, TV ads, paid online ads, emails, website, etc.) and offline (posters, flyers, direct mail, billboards, etc.) modes of marketing - even a physical store counts as a marketing channel. Essentially, they're the various ways a company gets its message out to potential customers.
Why Do They Matter?
Understanding the concept of marketing channels involves recognizing the different avenues through which companies can deliver their messaging to potential customers. Once you've identified your target market and you know their preferences, you can ascertain which channels they engage with. Those will be the channels you promote your business and offerings on.
Multi-channel marketing differs from traditional marketing in that it utilizes multiple channels to communicate with consumers. Simultaneously using different channels maximises a business's reach, allowing them to engage with a broader audience. This enables:
- greater brand awareness
- reaching customers at various touchpoints
- driving sales through integrated marketing campaigns (using coordinated and cohesive marketing efforts across multiple channels to encourage customers to make purchases)
Integrated marketing campaigns involve aligning messages, offers, and promotions across different marketing channels (such as social media, email, website, etc.) to create a unified and consistent customers experience. The goal is to generate interest, engagement, and ultimately sales by presenting a cohesive and persuasive message to potential customers regardless of the channel they're using.
But that doesn't mean you just go out and start posting on all social media platforms without a plan or framework behind you!
How Do You Apply Multichannel Marketing?
- Understand Your Audience: Start by understanding your target audience: who they are, what channels they use, and how they prefer to interact with businesses.
- Identify Relevant Channels: Determine which channels are most relevant to your audience. This could include social media platforms, email, websites, mobile apps, physical stores, etc.
- Create Consistent Messaging: Develop a consistent message and brand image across all channels. Ensure that your messaging resonates with your target audience and aligns with your overall marketing objectives.
- Integrate Channels: Integrate your marketing efforts across all channels to provide a seamless experience for your customers. This might involve coordinating promotions, offers, and messaging across different platforms.
- Optimize for Each Channel: Tailor your content and marketing strategies to suit each channel's unique characteristics and audience preferences. What works on social media may not work as well in email marketing, for example.
- Track and Analyze Performance: Monitor the performance of your multichannel marketing efforts using analytics tools. Track metrics such as engagement, conversions, and ROI to evaluate the effectiveness of each channel and make adjustments as needed.
- Continuously Improve: Continuously iterate and improve your multichannel marketing strategy based on insights from data analysis, feedback from customers, and changes in market trends.
Bonus Channel: Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing involves collaborating with individuals who have a significant following and influence within a specific industry or niche. That's called referent power, used by leaders to motivate the group to mimic them. By partnering with influencers, businesses can tap into new audiences, gain credibility, and drive brand awareness. Leveraging influencer marketing as part of a multi-channel strategy can help companies expand their reach and connect with customers in authentic ways.
3 Reasons to Use Multi-Channel Marketing
Diversification & Extended Reach
When a business chooses to use multiple channels of marketing, they are able to reach their audience at various touchpoints in the customer journey. It creates a more coherent and effective marketing strategy because you remind the customer of your existence at different stages of their buying journey. Naturally, you increase your brand awareness.
What's more, is that you may even find potential customers with different demographics on siloed platforms. I.e. You may have people who need your products and services but they only use one channel: let's say X (previously Twitter). They don't use Instagram. If you only marketed your company on Instagram, you lose that potential market of customers on X. So, multi-channel marketing enables companies to reach a wider pool of potential customers than one marketing channel. This increases brand exposure and market penetration.
Enhanced Customer Experience
As a result of being available on various different platforms, you allow your potential and existing pool of customers to reach you on their preferred channel, whether that's browsing your products on your website, watching your videos on YouTube, or messaging you on a messaging app. They don't have to put in the extra effort to find you, and that makes it convenient for you to be in their bubble of awareness. As a consequence of being available like this, you also increase the potential interactions, aka touchpoints, your audience has with your brand, which strengthens your brand's customer relationships and brand loyalty over time.
Target Your Audience Better
When a business tests marketing on different platforms, they will employ different modes of content based on the platform's norm. I.e. the type of marketing employed varies by channel. For example, the content a business posts on Instagram will not be the same as those it posts on X (Twitter). Besides the form of the content being different, the length, the humour and even the style of the content changes from video to text. Then, in email marketing, another digital marketing touchpoint, a business will use a completely different style of communications. It will all still be very much on brand, but the content itself will differ due to the nature of the platform and the fact that email is more private than social media.
As such, leveraging different channels of marketing will allow a company to test different styles of messaging to find what resonates best with their audience. You will be able to collect more data across a variety of platforms to improve your targeting and enable more personalised messaging, which then serves to boost your engagement, and conversions.
The data acquired from utilizing digital channels allows companies to effectively and profitably target specific demographics, track campaign performance, and engage with customers in real-time.
Bonus: Boost Engagement With Video Content
Video marketing has become increasingly popular as a way to engage customers and deliver compelling content. This type of content allows businesses to showcase their products or services, tell stories, and connect with audiences on an emotional level. Since marketing has transitioned into building connections with your audiences and offering them more than just a product to fulfil their base need, this is an important mode of boosting consumer trust in you. By incorporating video into their marketing strategy, companies can capture, nurture and retain the attention of viewers and drive engagement.
Omni-Channel Marketing
Omnichannel marketing takes the multi-channel approach further by seamlessly integrating all channels.
This approach focuses on providing a consistent brand message and ensuring that customers have a unified experience regardless of the channel they use. This allows customers to move between channels without any disruption. In doing so, businesses can enhance customer loyalty and drive repeat purchases.
Customer data and interactions are often centralized (that's where you'd use a customer relationship management software (CRM)), allowing businesses to have a single view of each customer regardless of the channel they use.
The goal is to create a cohesive customer journey and improve customer experience by providing personalized and consistent interactions across all touchpoints.
The Benefits of Omni-Channel Marketing
Behavioural Insights
Omnichannel marketing allows you to track how your audience behaves across different channels. With that data, you're able to learn how they interact with your brand, which forms of content perform best, and which support the most conversions. You can learn what your audience likes and doesn't like by testing different content on the different platforms, and you're able to then make your marketing efforts more efficient by allocating resources even more effectively.
Creating a Seamless Customer Experience
Multi-channel marketing's main criteria is to ensure you're available to your audience on multiple platforms. It doesn't require you to make it seamless and consistent. However, with omnichannel marketing, companies can deliver a cohesive customer experience across various touchpoints on several different types of marketing channels. You're able to reinforce your brand's messaging across different mediums. Whether a customer interacts with the brand through social media, the company website, or in-store, the messaging and branding remain consistent.
What's more, you'll be collecting data from each platform, to have it all under the customer's profile so that when you look into them, you know exactly where and how they've engaged with you.
So, when you talk with them, you're in a position to do so knowing what they're interested in and what they've already experienced with you. This integrated approach helps build trust with customers and fosters long-term relationships.
Effective Segmentation Strategies For Digital Marketing
As a result of knowing which brand touchpoints your potential and existing customers have already interacted with, you're in a better position to send them more personalized marketing messages. That's because you have a more complete, comprehensive and unifed view of each customer.
With omnichannel marketing, your business is able to deliver highly personalized experiences tailored to each segment. You can personalize website content, email campaigns, and in-store interactions based on a customer's browsing history, purchase behavior, and channel preferences. Their behavioural insights will inform you which content to send to the different segments.
Driving Sales
Integrated omnichannel campaigns allow businesses to connect with customers at different stages of the buyer's journey. By aligning marketing efforts across multiple channels, companies can guide customers through the sales funnel and ultimately drive conversions. This holistic approach to marketing ensures that customers receive relevant messaging at every step of their interaction with the brand.
What To Do After Identifying Your Favoured Marketing Channels
- Develop consistent brand messaging, tone and visuals to ensure you resonate with your target audience
- Optimize content for each channel (tailor the content and format to best suit each marketing channel, e.g. text-based for X, visual-heavy for Instagram, long-form blogs on the website)
- Integrate the channels (link socials to website, have email subscription forms easy to access, etc.)
- Measure and analyze performance of key and relevant metrics, inc reach, engagement, and conversions.
- Allocate resources according to whats working and what's not
- Continuously observe the market for trends, opportunities and threats to then iterate and improve on your multichannel marketing strategy
FAQ
Click to reveal FAQs
Should I bother with traditional or offline marketing channels as well?
Of course, especially if it matches your business model. Product-based brands, for example, may benefit from having brick-and-mortar touchpoints, while service-based brands may benefit from networking and in-person conferencing events. Remember that successful multi-channel marketing entails striking a balance between traditional and digital marketing methods. While digital channels offer real-time interaction and precise targeting, traditional channels like print and television can still reach a broad audience. Offline channels like physical stores and events still serve to strengthen the human connection in your audience. By integrating both approaches, businesses can leverage the strengths of each channel to create a comprehensive marketing strategy.
Q: What is multichannel marketing?
A: Multichannel marketing is a marketing approach where brands use a variety of different channels to reach their target audience. These channels can be both online and offline, such as digital marketing channels, traditional marketing channels, social media marketing, and more.
Q: How does omnichannel marketing differ from multichannel marketing?
A: Omnichannel marketing focuses on creating a seamless and consistent experience for customers across all channels. It integrates the different channels to provide a unified brand experience, while multichannel marketing uses various channels independently without necessarily creating a connected experience.
Q: What are the benefits of multi-channel marketing?
A: Multi-channel marketing offers several benefits, including increased brand visibility, wider reach to diverse audiences, better engagement with customers, improved customer experience, and higher conversion rates. It allows brands to leverage different channels to maximize their marketing efforts.
Q: How can businesses utilize word-of-mouth marketing in their multichannel marketing approach?
A: Businesses can encourage word-of-mouth marketing by providing exceptional products or services, incentivizing referrals and user-generated-content, engaging with customers on social media, and implementing customer review programs.
Q: What role does traditional marketing play in multichannel marketing?
A: Traditional marketing channels, such as print advertising, TV commercials, and direct mail, still have a place in multichannel marketing. By combining traditional marketing with digital channels, brands can reach a broader audience and create a more comprehensive marketing mix.
Q: How important is content marketing in a multi-channel marketing strategy?
A: Content marketing is essential in a multi-channel marketing strategy as it provides valuable and engaging content across different channels to attract and retain customers. Content can be tailored to suit each channel and target specific audience segments effectively.