Strengthening your relationship with your target audience and improving consumer trust are both possible through cross-channel marketing. What is cross channel marketing? This refers to the use of various channels—including social media, email, content, video, etc.—in your marketing strategy that adheres to the specific platform and delivers consistent messaging.
You’ll soon see the importance of cross-channel marketing is in the research. According to G2 Learn Hub, 50% of companies say their customers expect great design and cross-channel consistency from their brand, and 63% of employees state that consistent branding experience influences whether a deal is closed.
What's more, Smart Insights reports that Coke's "Share a Coke With" campaign was such a huge success (they experienced a 7% uplift in Coke consumption) because of their unified messaging across several platforms. Coke promoted its new bottles with names across social media, commercials, billboards, videos, and other avenues. The clever marketing “personalized” with names on each Coke bottle which inspired people to want to find and buy a bottle with their (or a friend’s) name on it. Coke showed that a mix of strong messaging across platforms is cross-channel marketing at its best.
Let’s discuss cross-channel marketing, its benefits for your brand, and expert tips for building your own campaign strategy.
Your brand must reach customers where they are, taking advantage of the ever-growing ways to do so at every step of their journey. Customer behaviors are forever changing, and platform popularity does as well.
Paying close attention to the best spots to reach and communicate with your audience — and regularly updating that data — will put you right where you need to be to attract new leads and build meaningful relationships with the right people.
Other important benefits of reaching your consumers everywhere they are, include:
Cross channel marketing tools offer you a unique way to reach your target audience via multiple marketing channels while maintaining reliably consistent experiences at every touchpoint. This marketing strategy has become so popular because consumers not only want to interact with their favorite brands on multiple channels but do so on nearly two dozen different cross channel platforms.
According to Internet Retailing, consumers (whom they label 'Hybrid Consumers' in the study) communicate with brands on an average of 20 channels and expect each experience to be consistent across all.
Although they are different approaches, this strategy is often confused with multichannel marketing and omnichannel marketing.
Multichannel marketing is a strategy that formed the foundation for omnichannel and cross channel. It introduced the important concept of using multiple channels to reach your consumers. However, it keeps each channel independent, with separate teams, delivering individual messages based on separate consumer data.
This strategy has been problematic for the most part, so most marketers have adapted to a cross-channel marketing strategy where multiple channels are still used, but consistency and cohesive data collection makes for seamless customer experiences throughout all channels.
Omnichannel, while it is the use of multiple channels and also prioritizes consistency, is more focused on interactive experiences. For instance, the recent advancement of AI and virtual reality has led to many omnichannel strategists utilizing VR in consumer shopping experiences (i.e., Amazon sellers using VR to allow consumers to view online products in their homes before making a purchase).
Consumers have many product/service options for most problems that need to be resolved. Your marketing efforts must be targeted to the right audience to not only bring awareness to 'just another option,' but create a connection and consumer trust that makes your offer stand out in front of the competition. Cross-channel marketing is the solution to brands' problems of constantly being ignored and overlooked.
Additional benefits of cross-channel marketing include the following:
Many marketers are experiencing a surge in ad blindness in today's market, also known as banner blindness. This issue refers to a target's selective attention and viewing behavior that leads to them ignoring ads. When consumers regularly ignore ads, brands suffer from a drop in engagement. However, cross-channel marketing resolves this problem by increasing engagement on other channels in the following ways:
Creating personalized content/experiences will increase your chances of the consumer being satisfied and trusting your brand. Forbes research shows that 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from brands that provide personalized experiences, and 72% admit they're only willing to engage with personalized messaging.
Personalization also reassures the consumer they can trust that you know how to solve their problem because you know them. If consumers know they can rely on you for a particular product or service, they will remain loyal to your brand. Cross-channel marketing lets them know they can always reach you if they need to and count on you to cater to their specific needs.
Cross channel management allows you to gain new revenue opportunities from new and existing customers. Research shows that customer satisfaction is 23 times higher in companies with consistent and aligned multichannel strategies. Furthermore, 50% of marketers say that they usually or always hit their financial targets when using multiple channels to deliver their message.
To get a fully holistic view of your results, use cross-channel marketing attribution. Cross-channel attribution allows you to give credit and measure the effect of each individual touchpoint while examining how each touchpoint connects to the others and works cohesively throughout the customer’s lifecycle. By using this technique, your business will be able to identify which touchpoints are faithfully bringing in leads, and you’ll be able to invest more resources towards the channels that are supplying the most positive results.
Since cross channels are collaborative, the metrics are continuous and help you better understand your marketing effort's effectiveness at every stage. For instance, you will make better use of all the consumer data you've collected. In cases where multiple channels are not aligned and consistent, teams do not work together, and therefore, do not share important consumer data.
Despite its proven success and high acclaim, some marketers still have yet to take advantage of the opportunities presented to them by cross-channel marketing. According to Gurus Coach, for at least 21% of marketers, a lack of understanding of building a campaign that requires multiple channels is the main reason they aren't taking advantage.
Here are our top tips for building a cross-channel marketing campaign to inspire you to be a part of the successful 79%.
Building your customer profiles using data should be the first step in the process — as this allows you to understand where is best to reach your customers. After building customer profiles, be sure to have all data unified using a customer data platform (CDP) to track the analytics of your customers' journey. This will allow you to track your customers in their various buyer journey stages while also being mindful of data privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.
Next, you need to put all your hard work into action by identifying what channels your audience prefers so that you can reach them where they spend most of their time. This will allow you to target your customers more effectively and build a more cohesive cross-channel marketing campaign.
To do this, you will need to access your CDP, pull out your customer's journey, and pinpoint:
Customize your content to fit each viewer's journey and preferred channel. Personalization has extended beyond 'nice to have' and has been quickly thrown into a marketer's 'must-have.' The truth is, online pioneers have gotten consumers well-accustomed to personalized experiences to the point that at least 80% have grown to not only desire it — but expect it from brands (according to research company, McKinsey).
One way to create consistently personalized messaging is through 'smart content.' Smart content, also known as adaptive and dynamic content, refers to the process of your channel — i.e., ad, email, website, etc. —updating according to the visitor/viewer. It utilizes the target's demographics, past behaviors, location, and other data to tailor the content to each viewer and their specific needs.
To get the most out of your experience with cross-channel marketing, you must have access to all of its best practices and techniques. Media Now's team can work closely with you to develop the perfect cross-channel marketing campaign — tailored to your brand and audience and guided by experienced and knowledgeable cross-channel marketing experts.
When you're ready to start building consumer trust among your audience, contact us for more about our advertising services.