Cross-channel marketing is a customer-focused digital marketing technique used by marketers globally to provide an integrated experience across all paid, owned, earned media, and digital experiences.
It is a powerful way of designing your marketing strategy and implementing data and analysis to create omnichannel customer journeys towards your goals.
Implementing a cross-channel marketing strategy can be a little intimidating. You need to take care of multiple channels while designing your campaigns.
Keeping track of every campaign and integrating their analytics is certainly not an easy task. That's where our RACE Framework comes in.
So, before we dive into cross-channel marketing, let’s take a moment to assess your business' marketing needs. Did you know you can book a free 1-2-1 membership consultation to discuss your objectives in the context of our omnichannel RACE Framework?
You'll identify challenges and review solutions across an integrated marketing funnel. Book your call to find out more. Book your free 1-2-1 consultation to develop your new strategy with the RACE FrameworkNeed a winning marketing strategy?
Cross-channel marketing improves the shopping experience of customers through personalization. It allows you to reach out to your customers across multiple channels to ensure that your brand remains in front of their eyes at all times.
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Learn MoreThrough cross-channel marketing, you can move your prospects seamlessly through the sales funnel across multiple channels. You can pick up your marketing on another channel from the exact point where it stopped on the first channel.
With the increasing number of marketing channels, having an efficient cross-channel marketing strategy in place for your marketing campaigns is a necessity. You need to ensure that your brand is in front of your audience at all times. This way, there are better chances of converting them.
Here are some tips that will help you create a winning cross-channel marketing strategy:
It’s essential to understand your customers before you create your marketing strategy for them. For this, you should create rich buyer personas that contain information about your customers’ preferences, behaviors, buying habits, and preferred modes of communication. If you already have a following on social media, you can use social listening to achieve this. Through it, you can find out your audience’s needs, desires, and pain points. These can be crucial for developing your buyer personas.
Invest time into creating these persons to figure out what your customers like and what they don’t. Think beyond the classic customer behavioral patterns to come up with a diverse range of buyer profiles. Remember, the better you know each of your buyers, the more accurate your strategy will be.
Observe your buyers. What do they buy? What’s their buying frequency? How are these purchases made? Where is the traffic coming from?
One of the most effective ways to do so is by imitating the buyer’s journey. Start by exploring your website, search through different categories, place an order, and file a customer support claim. Basically, go through the entire user experience yourself, from the start to the final payment. This can help you figure out what you need to offer to your customers.
Define audience personas Part of the Content marketing Toolkit Learn how to develop a customer persona that can help you to target your marketing more effectivelyCore Module
Looking for new marketing strategy tools and templates to optimize your company's cross-channel marketing activities? Why not book a call with a member of our customer team to discuss how your business can benefit from the RACE Framework? Our calls are designed to put you in the driver's seat, discuss your strengths and weaknesses and identify solutions so you come away with a practical action plan and recommended next steps integrated across the RACE Framework. Book your free 1-2-1 consultation to develop your new strategy with the RACE FrameworkNeed a winning marketing strategy?
When you’re selecting channels for cross-channel marketing, you need to be selective. Certain channels work better together than others. Try to incorporate all channels through which your audience interacts the most with your brand.
For example, you can ask your customers to check in via your app when in your store, or include URLs in emails.
Common mediums that complement each other include:
The backbone of a cross-channel marketing strategy is having all your data within a customer data platform (CDP). It’s essential that you have the analytics data available to capture and analyze your leads’ touchpoints.
Typically, this involves using browsing cookies or tracking URLs to establish connections between online actions with an individual lead’s profile. Track and analyze the emails that have been sent to them, and which ones they have interacted with.
You must also know which blog posts they have read, the social media campaigns they engaged with, and conversations that your customer support team had with them. All of this data should be in your CDP.
Each customer's journey is different, and each of them should be treated differently. This includes designing content specifically for individuals based on their consumer habits. As a result, your content strategy needs to be designed so that it aligns well with all buyers’ journeys.
For example, when a customer abandons their cart, you can send out an email that offers a discount to them. Similarly, for those who purchase your products, you can send them a thank you email. This way, they’ll engage with your content on a different channel and take the action you want them to.
Also, personalization can improve your sales as customers are more likely to engage with content that gives personalized recommendations. Nearly 84% of customers said that being treated as a person is crucial for winning their business.
Book your free 1-2-1 membership consultation call to discuss which of our personalization tools and templates your business can use to accelerate your results and increase your ROI from marketing.
Book your free 1-2-1 consultation to develop your new strategy with the RACE Framework
Book consultationSocial media is one of the most crucial channels for implementing a cross-channel marketing strategy. Multiple social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest allow you to take advantage of visuals to engage with your audience.
At the same time, they give you the opportunity to interact directly with consumers; something that isn’t possible in most other channels. This can help you increase your brand awareness, engagement, and even conversions.
Using social media, you can also divert your traffic to other channels and define your buyer personas, as mentioned above. It’s thus necessary to have a strong presence on social media to build a powerful cross-channel marketing strategy.
Paid social media allows more sophistication within your cross-channel marketing strategy. For example, one popular option is the Facebook pixel which you can use to retarget customers who visit specific web pages with relevant content. You can retarget customers on a number of social media platforms, Google AdWords, and other advertising networks.
A control group is basically a group of users who do not receive your ads from your marketing campaigns. Consider using different control groups that are not targeted by any cross-channel marketing to assess your marketing campaigns’ effectiveness.
They can be used to measure the impact of engagement campaigns to determine which marketing campaign is working effectively and which needs to be optimized more.
Control groups also tell marketers if they should refrain from using any marketing campaign at all for a particular segment of consumers and simply let those consumers follow their usual path.
Once you have tested and analyzed your marketing campaigns, you can always send the same campaign to the control group after the test is over. Instead of sending a wrong marketing campaign to everyone at once, you can test the efficacy of your campaigns in small batches.
Conversion optimization Part of the Digital marketing strategy and planning Toolkit Learn about the principles and best practices for setting up a simple AB test and a broader CRO programmeAdvanced Module
76% of customers said that it’s easy to switch brands to find ones that match their expectations. To ensure that you don’t lose out on customers, you need to ensure that your customer support is available at all times. You must try your best to resolve all of your customers’ problems to improve their satisfaction, else they may shift to another brand.
channelImage via SalesforceThis is especially important for e-commerce marketers who could be at the receiving end of the customer’s wrath when they don’t get good customer support. You must thus invest in your customer support and add options such as live chat and chatbots to your store. This can help you resolve customer questions instantly.
You should aim to provide exceptional service that leaves the customer feeling respected and valued. It increases customer loyalty and also generates positive word-of-mouth, which enhances your brand awareness. Make sure that your customer service-related interactions transition smoothly between all channels.
Book your free 1-2-1 membership consultation call to discuss which of our customer support tools and templates your business can use to improve customer service and retain high-value customers.
Book your free 1-2-1 consultation to develop your new strategy with the RACE Framework
Book consultationCreating powerful cross-channel marketing campaigns is one thing, but analyzing their insights can dramatically change your marketing game. Interweave your findings from your marketing campaigns to create a seamless experience.
Ask yourself questions like:
When all channels are well-integrated together, the customer experience will be better. Your customers will be confident, and they’ll know what to expect every time they engage with your brand.
Download our Business Processional Resource – Omnichannel marketing planning guide
Our omnichannel planning guide will outline the differences between omni and multichannel marketing and then help you create a strategy and roadmap for achieving your own omnichannel marketing objectives, using examples from global brands.
Access the Omnichannel marketing planning guide
By leveraging the data insights from your marketing campaigns, you can make constant improvements to ensure that your cross-channel marketing strategy is driving real results.
A cross-channel marketing strategy is an effective and sophisticated way to reach out to your audience. From creating brand awareness to generating leads and driving higher sales, a powerful cross-channel marketing strategy will help you do it all.
You must ensure that your content and customer service are well-aligned with each channel to provide a smooth transition to your audience. Test your strategy with control groups and polish it until it becomes perfect.
Are there other things you keep in mind while implementing a cross-channel marketing strategy or do you have any tips to add? Let me know in the comments.
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