Consumers today are picky. With all the flashy banner ads out there and the spammy emails filling up their inbox, they’re becoming more selective in how they choose to engage with brands. This makes it critical for companies to be where their customers are, which is everywhere. Sometimes called cross-channel marketing, multi-channel marketing uses numerous channels to orchestrate a brand’s message or campaign to the right people through the right medium.
Here are the five key steps for creating a successful multichannel campaign:
- Always start with a goal: Determine which specific marketing goal you are trying to achieve. What do you want to accomplish with your campaign? Are you looking to increase sales, or perhaps improve customer engagement? Have your goal(s) clearly in mind so you can easily plan what you need and how it will be executed. Make sure you have SMART goals, which are:
- Specific
- Measureable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-based
- Know your audience: Before you can start building your campaign, figure out who you’re talking to. This is important for two reasons; one, it guides the tone of your content, making it targeted to your audience, and two, it determines which channels the campaign will be most relevant on, where your audience will actually engage with it. Regardless of the channel, make sure the message is consistent and targeted.
- Choose channels wisely: As we just mentioned, channels will be largely dictated by your audience. You need to figure out which combination of channels is likely to resonate with your target audience based on their past interactions with you. If you don’t have past data to lean on, a customer survey is a good way to ask them how they would prefer to engage with you.
Remember: the newest channels that have a lot of buzz are not always the best channels to reach YOUR audience. - Create a consistent and compelling messaging: A good multichannel campaign provides a consistent experience across all channels. Your brand voice and value should remain the same, considering your customers don’t think in terms of channels like marketers often do. Make any transition between channels seamless.
In addition to consistency, your message needs to be interesting to capture your audience’s interest. How are you improving your customers’ situation? What sets you apart from your competitors? What do they need to do to get what you’re offering? Answering these questions within your copy/ creative can help you stand out! - Track and measure success: If you only take away one piece of advice from this article I hope it’s this. You must track your digital marketing campaign’s performance. Sadly, this is one of the most skipped steps in creating a multi-channel campaign. Most platforms capture performance data for whatever channel they were created for (email service providers, social media tools, etc.), but they do not tell the full story of what happened when a user entered your website from the source of the campaign. For this you will need Google Analytics, and you will need to make sure your digital campaigns have proper parameters added to the URLs you are including in your campaigns. Doing so will allow you to identify the traffic that came from the channel and campaign, giving you insights on if and how users converted.
Properly planning a multichannel campaign takes time and effort, but when done well, is completely worth it! By remembering these important tips, you can plan a campaign that will get your message in front of the right people and in the right way.
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