Your brand will never be successful if you’re talking to the wrong people. You can scream at the top of your lungs and still won’t yield any results. Without using the ideal multichannel branding campaigns, there’s no way you can find the audience you’re looking for.
How we communicate with each other has evolved a lot over the years. The same goes for businesses trying to deliver their message to the target audience. Social media wasn’t available 20 years ago and businesses didn’t have to build unique social media strategies. How businesses communicate with customers has changed.
Today, businesses are relying more and more on multichannel branding strategies. The reason to do so is simple, not all marketing channels reach the same kind of audiences. One of the biggest benefits of multi-channel marketing is that it helps businesses reach all kinds of audiences.
You need to find the voice of your brand for different social media channels. What may work on Instagram may not work on LinkedIn and vice versa. Let’s dive in a little deeper into what multichannel branding is and how businesses can use it to their advantage.
What is Multichannel Branding?
Multichannel marketing strategy focuses on several distributions and promotional platforms into a single, unified strategy that can boost revenue. With a multichannel marketing campaign, businesses can reach more customers effectively and efficiently. This also allows businesses to better communicate with their target audience and spread the message about a product’s strength, USP, and more.
Multichannel branding often uses common marketing channels such as Email, Direct mail, websites, social media channels, display ads, retail storefronts, and other types of ads. Skilled marketers develop marketing strategies that rely on multiple marketing channels so they can reach the maximum number of customers.
Benefits of Multi-Channel Marketing
Marketers all over the world love to leverage multi-channel marketing strategies. One study claims that multi-channel marketing has the capability of getting more customers than normal marketing strategies. Here are some of the best benefits of multi-channel marketing:
- Expanded Reach: The simplest and most common method of using muti channel marketing is the level of increased reach it provides to the customers. Perfectly executed multichannel branding tactics can make sure that your business is able to reach a potential audience. With a multichannel marketing campaign, it’s easy to tap in on untapped markets.
- Increased Engagement: When you promote your business or product on multiple channels, you increase the chance of engagement. As more people will see your brand on several social media channels, chances are they’d engage with your brand on one of these channels. With promotion on more channels, it opens up a new line of conversation. The more conversation you have with a customer, the better are your chances of getting more sales.
- Reach Consumers on Their Preferred Channel: Consumers of all kinds interact with a lot of different sources of media every day. Having your presence on these channels can be incredibly helpful for growing businesses. Instead of waiting for customers to find the business, marketers can use multichannel branding to reach the customers where they are. Let’s say a customer has an interest in what you’re selling, if you can manage to reach those customers on their preferred media channel, you’ll be able to increase your chances of sales.
Combined Channels Lead to Better Marketing
There are always some great benefits whenever skilled marketers create strategies that target multiple media channels. Multichannel marketing strategy creates opportunities for creating more impactful messages that are great for the customer journey. With so many channels to target, it’s easy to build custom strategies and share brand messaging with the customers. Here are the two examples of how these media channels can be integrated with each other for better campaigns:
- Social Media & Television: According to some studies, marketing campaigns that target both television and social media platforms saw a significant lift in improving brand image. This is because social media helps in clarifying and strengthening the marketing messaging directed towards customers. By staying connected to the customers, businesses can convert more audiences into paying customers.
- Radio and Television: While the number of radio listeners has dropped down over the years, radio ads are proven to help consumers remember TV ads. By combining radio and television as a marketing medium, brand recall for TV ads has seen an improvement by 35%. According to a theory, this effect happens because it’s incredibly cost-effective to serve consumers short radio ads. Then these brands can solidify the brand image in their minds by showing engaging TV commercials.
Challenges of Multi-Channel Marketing
While the benefits of multi-channel marketing are great, there are some challenges involved in it as well. Multichannel marketing strategy isn’t the right kind of strategy for all kinds of businesses. Before you implement this strategy for your business, you should be aware of the challenges of multi-channel marketing.
1. Efficient Management
Promoting businesses on more channels requires a better level of management. Marketers need to allot more time and resources to build strategies that integrate all the channels. In addition to this, many businesses suffer from inefficient communication channels. Other teams such as finance or operations may have a better understanding of consumer behavior compared to marketing, it may be difficult to manage a multi-channel branding strategy without the combined effort of all the teams.
2. Proper Marketing Attribution
The importance of accurate marketing attribution becomes clear when organizations focus on multichannel marketing. Promoting businesses and services on several channels makes it difficult to determine which channeled to which result.
It’s crucial to attribute the results to individual social media channels. To get the best possible results, marketers need to rely on attribution models such as Unified Marketing Measurement, which provides insights on impressions and engagement for online and offline channels.
3. Utilizing Marketing Analytics
Marketing teams usually have a firm grip on business analytics. Although multichannel marketing strategies often show improper tactics. When creating multi-channel marketing campaigns, 37% of marketers found it challenging to rely on customer data, and 55% found it tough to add customer data to existing customer profiles.
The data has suggested that these problems come up because of a lack of expertise. To build proper channels, marketers need to undergo training to develop these skills or use an analytics platform that makes data analysis simpler for inexperienced.
4. Follow Up With Innovations
Technologies are always evolving, and marketers need to keep up with these innovations. Just a decade ago, marketers were learning how to optimize Ads on Facebook. Now there are several channels that marketers need to manage, and it’s almost impossible to master every social media platform. To stay ahead of their competitors, marketers need to constantly research up-and-coming channels and come up with strategies that will maximize the value of their messaging on these channels.
5. Targeting Messages
You don’t just have to broadcast your brand messages in every possible direction, you also need to make sure that your message resonates with the customers. This is why marketers need to create quality messages. Multi-channel messages should be focused around a customer’s demographic, psychographic, and purchasing habits while making sure that these channels are which the customers frequent. This needs an in-depth, and personalized approach to multichannel branding.
How to Build the Perfect Multichannel Marketing Strategy?
Multi-channel marketing campaigns require more focus and effort. Marketers need to choose the correct channels for specific customer segments while designing the ideal creative content for the audience that uses the mentioned platform. To do this, marketers need a deeper understanding of marketing data, businesses can do this by following these steps:
1. Break-Down Separate Business Divisions
Separate business divisions disrupt communication and stop collaboration across various departments. Organizational silos happen naturally in a business unless special measures are taken. People tend to stay loyal to their group and they may not share information on datasets outside of their team. Breaking down these barriers can be tough as it requires the entire organization to work together for a single cause. Once a business is able to do so, unified and cohesive messaging works across every channel.
2. Use a Multi-Channel Marketing Platform
Marketing and optimization platforms are crucial for creating a successful multi-channel strategy. These marketing tools help in tracking campaigns across channels while making sure every department operates in synergy. What’s even better is that these marketing tools can also offer optimization features, and advanced marketing analytics will help your teams evaluate the path that leads to consumer purchase. This promotes accurate marketing attribution, it helps marketers to create a better strategy by leveraging customer data.
3. Understanding Target Audience
A multichannel marketing campaign needs a more in-depth view of your target market. Before building a strategy, markers should do thorough research and collect enough data about their target audience through extensive market research. These personas should outline which channels target customers to frequent on, and what advertisements customers often engage with, and include relevant demographic information.
4. Create Messaging that Sticks
Customers are most likely to remember your ads and about your brand, if the messaging you’re trying to broadcast is consistent. This doesn’t mean that marketers should overwhelm their target customers with the same type of messages over and over again. Instead, marketers should try to build messages that are consistent across channels, and if possible this message can be personalized based on customer habits.