What Are The Benefits of Multi Channel Marketing
Multichannel marketing is all about the customer’s choices. In multichannel marketing, a business allows the customer to choose their preferred channel for their purchases, whenever and wherever they want to. In B2B marketing, multichannel marketing uses direct and indirect marketing communications to increase interest in a brand and what that brand provides or offers.
Although most marketers know what cross channel marketing is, very few brands are implementing this strategy fully.
Multi channel marketing is a strategy that makes sense. Businesses cannot reach their full potential by clinging on to one marketing channel. Several marketing strategies might be used to hit company goals.
In this article, we want to highlight the benefits of multi channel, how it works, and the challenges associated with this marketing strategy as well as how to effectively use multi channel marketing.
What is Multi channel Marketing?
Just like we said above, multichannel marketing is all about choice. However, you can define this multi channel marketing as follows:
Some of the channels used for multi channel marketing purposes are:
- Direct mail
- Mobile App
- Advertisements
- Retail storefront
- Website
- Social media
- Word of mouth
Multi channel marketing is not limited to the above channels. There are many other channels you can blend in that will help you reach your prospects.
Benefits Of Multi channel Marketing
There are several benefits of incorporating a multi channel marketing strategy. Many marketers attribute their success to multi channel marketing and digital marketing campaigns. Below are some of the perceived benefits of using multi channel marketing campaign in business.
Improves Customer Trust
When you use multi channel marketing, customers see the same message across different platforms and thus they develop trust and become loyal. Multi channel marketing allows you to give your customers more touch points and let’s you engage them with valuable content.
Better Targeting
With all these different channels and media at your disposal, you can target specific customers from different demographics and behaviors. Every customer is receptive to their preferred channel. Some love to receive communication through Facebook or emails and others prefer other channels like TV, Radio, phone calls, or text messages. Cross channel marketing is highly beneficial to businesses because messages sent out reach target customers no matter the channel used.
Increased Engagement
If you are selling services or have a product you want to sell, having multiple channels of promoting your product sounds better than just using a single channel. Multi channel marketing increases leads and therefore there is a possibility of making a sell.
Multi channel marketing Makes it Easy To Collect Data
Getting data about demographics and buying habits of your prospective customers can be gruelsome and expensive too. Multi channel marketing makes the data collection process a bit easy. With the multiple channels you incorporate in multi channel marketing, you can easily gain knowledge about your customer.
Saves Money
Cross channel marketing can save you a lot of costs if you manage this strategy properly. With a good mix of channels, company owners can gain a return on investment a bit faster. Email is one the most powerful sales channel with the highest ROI.
Why Is Multi channel Marketing Important For Businesses?
Brand Awareness
It can be pretty hard for customers to find you if your brand is not out there. With multi channel marketing, your brand can be easily recognized because the more the brand is out there the more prospects remember.
Be present where Your Audience is
Your users can be online at any time using more than two screens like TV, computer or, phones.
Using multi channel marketing, you can increase your brand’s presence in all the channels your users are active.
Increase your customer base at lower costs
This is another benefit of multi channel marketing; acquiring more customers at an affordable cost. When you carefully combine best multiple channels, you will reach wider audiences and a very low cost per acquisition.
We insist that you choose the most appropriate channels for multi channel marketing plan because you get to target consumers in the right channels, increasing the customer conversion rate.
Challenges Of Using Multi channel Marketing
Every marketing strategy has its advantages as well as challenges. Like other strategies multi channel marketing comes with its challenges.
Below are some of the most common challenges a business may face when using multi channel marketing:
Marketing and Strategy
When marketers talk about multichannel marketing, all they think of is reaching out to a wider market with various channels so strategy is left out. Multi channel strategy is all about how customers move from one channel to another and how they interact.
Complexity
Creating a multi channel strategy is not easy because you must have a cohesive message across multiple channels.
That’s not all, the messaging keeps on changing as more data is gathered from customers.
That means that you will keep on changing tools and platforms thus you must be able to understand data.
Attribution
The problem with multichannel marketing is you don’t know who deserves the credit for the increase of revenue. Companies have several marketing departments and thus it can be a bit hard to tell which marketing team brought in the success. This lack of attribution makes it hard for marketing teams to make decisions on resources and proper budgeting.
Time And Resources
Multi channel marketing constantly requires new tools and software. Not just that, you need time and enough resources to run a successful multi channel marketing. Unfortunately, most companies don’t have the resources and even time to build a successful multi channel marketing.
Steps To Follow To Start Your Multi channel Marketing Campaign
Now that you have learnt about the benefits and challenges of multi channel marketing strategy, we want to give you four steps that you can follow to start your multi channel marketing campaign:
Know Your Target Audience
A multi channel marketing campaign will be effective if you know your audience and where they spend most of their time. With the information on what channel your customers use, you can include those channels in your campaign.
Use Automation Tools
It is very important to include the aspect of time when creating your multi channel marketing campaign. If you want each customer to receive the same type of content at the same time, then you have to use timing automation tools.
Automation tools will help you stay in touch with multiple customers as well as stick to a schedule.
Track Your Results
Tracking results when using multi channel marketing campaigns can seem a bit hard but it is very important to track your results. You can start the tracking process by tracking responses and engagement rate. Try to find out the channels that are getting more results so that you can modify and improve your strategy.
Multi channel marketing strategy involves a trial and error process because you try out new platforms and some can bring in tremendous results so it’s worth the risk.
Concentrate On Your Messaging
If you want your marketing to be on people’s mind then you have to create a robust messaging campaign that is consistent and also resonates with them. You have to create a brand personality and a brand voice that has a strong connection with your audiences.
Your brand personality will help you come up with a common and consistent messaging across multiple marketing channels.
Multi channel Marketing Vs Omnichannel Marketing
Although most people think that multichannel marketing and omnichannel marketing are the same, these two strategies are completely different. Multi channel marketing is channel based while omnichannel marketing is shopper based.
Omnichannel marketing aims at providing a consistent and customized experience for all customers across all channels.
The main goal of using omnichannel marketing is to improve customer shopping experience and make the shopping process easy with a different approach.
Conclusion
There are so many conventions about multi channel marketing strategy. If used well, this strategy can help businesses to hit their marketing goals easily at low costs. The trick is flexibility. You can try out as many channels as you want with multi channel marketing.