There are many different marketing channels available to businesses. From pay-per-click ads to content marketing and social media, there are numerous, diverse options for promoting your products. Businesses will often focus most of their efforts on a single channel. A pottery company may put the most time and energy into marketing on Pinterest, while a used car dealership might mainly use paid advertisements. To get the most out of your campaign, though, you need to use multiple channels in conjunction with one another.
If you’re focusing too much on one area, you may not be reaching your entire target audience or delivering the right message at the right time and place. Using multiple channels is the best strategy for boosting traffic and increasing sales. Here are a few suggestions for how to deliver your message seamlessly across channels.
Know Your Target Audience Inside and Out
You need to have a solid understanding of your customers’ buying decisions before you can decide how to deliver your pitch. First, it’s important to understand what customers want from a product. Doing market research on social media and with various analytics tools can help you find this information.
In order to deliver the right content at right time, you also need to understand how a customer’s motivations throughout the purchase process. A customer wants to know general information about a product at the beginning of the process and selects a specific retailer at the end of the process.
Combining your knowledge of your target audience with this information will help you decide what kind of content will be most effective for delivery information.
Understand How Different Channels Work
Different marketing channels will work better for different kinds of businesses, and the best campaign for your target audience will vary over time. Just look at all the social media sites springing up each year. You may not have known what Instagram was a few years ago, but now there’s a good chance you’re using it.
It’s a good idea to first use your analytics data and break things down on a micro-conversion level when approaching multi-channel marketing. Understanding how customers are getting to your social media sites, business websites and ads is very important. You can use this information to decide what message and channel will be most effective at each stage.
You’ll also want to develop a good understanding of each marketing channel available. There are many different options out there, and each one has its own advantages and disadvantages. Remember: there’s a good chance you’ll have different needs at different stages, and that’s to be expected. You may find it useful to use one channel at the beginning of the buyer’s journey and another at the end.
Select Your Channels
Once you’ve thoroughly investigated your target audience’s buying habits and learned all you can about your marketing options, it’s time to choose your channels. At this stage, you’ll not only select the different tools you’ll use to market to customers—you’ll also plan how they’ll work together.
Say you’re marketing for a jeweler. Your challenge is to convince customers now is the right time to buy that new necklace or pair of earrings. In the early stages of a campaign you might still want to whet buyers’ appetites through content marketing. Perhaps you could craft a post on how fine diamonds are mined or an infographic on wedding ring purchases.
Be sure to announce the release of a new collection on social media, in your blog and via email – if you do email marketing. The more channels you use to make customers aware of your new products, the better. You can also run PPC or PPI ads to drive more traffic to your site. After you’ve piqued customers’ interest, you can give them the reason to buy right now by holding a sale. Mountz Jewelers is doing just this with a promotion on this season’s Pandora rings. Be sure to announce a sale on as many channels as possible—again this will make more people aware of the promotion.
Tweak Your Message
Over time you’ll want to evaluate how your marketing efforts are doing and identify changes to make in the future. Analytics reports are a great way to do so. They can show you exactly which channels are bringing in the most traffic and which are performing a little worse than expected. You may decide to tweak your approach or experiment with new channels based on this data.
Multi-channel marketing can seem a little overwhelming with all the different factors involved, but it really does work in the long run. As long as you make informed decisions and track your progress, you have no reason to worry about your campaign.
Published: June 23, 2014
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