Rat Race Armaggeddon: 3 Ways To Use Cross Channel Marketing To Reach Your Marketing Goals

Thursday, April 20, 2017

3 Ways To Use Cross Channel Marketing To Reach Your Marketing Goals

Despite that new media, platforms and ways to approach your customer are springing up like mushrooms, the real burning issue for marketers stays the same: what is the best strategy to reach customers and extend the business prosperity?

Of course we know, there is no one, clear answer to that. All that matters is specificity of particular business and with that being said, business goals we want to achieve. After all nobody but you, knows what is most important: lead generating, building brand awareness, increasing revenue or engagement in offline channel. Despite those differentiations we identify 3 universal rules, to help us achieve our marketing goals, whatever they are.

1. Be Where Your Customer Is

Through many challenges that marketers face, one is discovering customers' needs, behavior and customs. Where does he watch our products for most of the time? What device does he use for that? What is the path that he follows to get to our site? Or maybe he is more into traditional paper-based offers and offline stores?

Of course we certainly can manage to know our model based customer. On the other side, what we should not do, is to walk out on significant minorities (as they grow bigger, when overall traffic grows). The answer is simple: we have to be visible everywhere.

Take good care of your website to make it user-friendly, as well as responsive for mobile devises. Spread out the word about great deals throughout social media, as well as by printing traditional paper-based coupons. Engage customers in brick-and-mortar stores with push notifications and sms messages. Little bit overwhelming? Fear not! Using marketing automation you can easily bring synergy to all channels and all actions taken. Moreover, during that you create the best journey path possible. From that point marketing strategy (and budgets!) optimization gets smoother every day.

2. Don't Judge Everyone By One Standard

Let’s suppose you already create perfect customer journey path. It is great, of course, but as technology is upgrading, the standards customers expect are also rising. In practice it means customers won’t appreciate an offer or discount, unless it’s dedicated to them. It has to be designed in such way to create unique shopping experience and build brand loyalty.

This approach in general applies to offer itself, but also to path to purchase traffic. This is why it is crucial to gain full purchase history from all channels, to track customers behavior and to follow their way. Success on multichannel field is meet your customer's expectations and needs (or sometimes to create them from the scratch). The key here is to wisely segment the data, analyze it and successfully use in cross channel strategy.

3. Timing is the Key

Saying that timing is the key is a huge underestimation. It is everything! Most polished up content, great discounts or even one of a kind products won’t help if it reaches the customer at an inadequate time.

Every day we are bombed with information: digital and paper-based. It is on marketers side to create and optimize communication in such a way, that a user can see it and get interested, despite circumstances. Nowadays it is (almost!) mandatory to communicate simultaneously on all platforms and channels.

Finishing purchase is far more than just drive user to shopping cart site – it is just the beginning. We have to keep in mind, that during browsing user can switch up the devise, close the tab and forget about it and he can leave the online channel altogether, going towards offline.

Unified cross channel marketing strategy is unmeasurable help in that matter – the process of closing the deal in unbreakable – it just moves from spot to spot. Bottom line is: you can reach your customer when it is convenient to them, and this is the only time that is right.

Technology to the Rescue

So what is the conclusion? Most important these days is customization, covering whole consumer shopping behavior and habits. Based on this, we can manage to create all other elements and in consequence: unify cross channel marketing strategy.

Starting from information and product placement, through highly customized content, closing with precise timing, aiming the right people on right time.

As the demand for multichannel campaign management (MCCM) grows, the number of vendors has grown, too. With so many options, how do you assess the capabilities of each one to make the best choice for your company?

Download Gartner Magic Quadrant For Multichannel Campaign Management to learn the strengths and cautions associated with each vendor.