When looking to boost your business and increase sales, it can be difficult to decide which marketing strategy to employ. As the typical customer shopping experience evolves, the different avenues of communicating with customers is expanding with it. A brand’s marketing strategy must continue to adapt with the evolving landscape of platforms.
In this article we will define multi-channel marketing, discuss multi-channel marketing strategies, and review examples of multi-channel marketing.
Let’s dive in.
What is Multi-Channel Marketing?
Multi-channel marketing, also known as cross-channel marketing, is a strategy that involves using a combination of channels to communicate a marketing message. Multi-channel marketing campaigns aim to reach potential customers through many different avenues in order to maximize the amount of people they can reach.
The different avenues are designed to reach customers where they naturally are and at their preferred method.
A few examples of marketing channels include promotional emails, direct mailers, newspaper ads, social media, blogs, radio ads, websites, search engine ads, and retail displays. Having a multi-channel marketing campaign increases the exposure of your brand.
As people continue to see your brand in different places, they will become more familiar with it. Consumers are present across many different channels at many different times. Multi-channel marketing strategies aim to try to meet customers where they are.
Multi-Channel Marketing Strategies
Successful multi-channel marketing strategies understand that their customers are spreading their attention across many different platforms. Their experience with their brand across these various platforms needs to be consistent. Having a consistent message across platforms creates a seamless experience and an understandable brand.
The primary goal of multi-channel marketing campaigns is to increase sales. Increasing brand awareness is an integral component of increasing sales. The multi-channel marketing strategies discussed in this article are designed to increase brand awareness and therefore increase sales.
Know Your Target Audience
When considering implementing multi-channel marketing, the first step is to understand the buyer you’re targeting. You’ll want to consider their demographics and psychographics.
Psychographics would include people’s values, opinions, and interests. Demographics would include their age, job, and income.
Recommended Reading: Market Segmentation: What Is it and Why It’s Important for Marketing
Knowing your target audience will help you craft your messaging in a way that’s appealing to them. This will help build a relationship between your brand and your target audience, which can help increase sales.
Understanding who your target buyer is will help you understand where they spend their time and which platforms they interact with. This will help you with the next strategy, which is finding the best channels to target.
Target Specific Channels
It’s important to understand who your target buyer is in order to help you know which channels to target. With an almost endless selection of channels to spend your marketing dollars on, it would be impossible to choose all of them.
In order to maximize your marketing dollars, you need to choose wisely when crafting your multi-channel marketing campaign.
You want to meet your target audience where they already are. If your audience members typically aren’t reading blogs, it wouldn’t make sense to spend time and money advertising on blogs. If your audience primarily shops online, it wouldn’t be a good idea to invest a large amount of money into retail endcap displays.
When crafting a multi-channel marketing campaign to increase sales, concentrate your efforts on the channels where your target audience spends their time. This will help increase brand awareness amongst your target audience.
Have Consistent Messaging
Ultimately whether your customer primarily shops online or in-store, uses your mobile app or prefers your website, the messaging across all platforms needs to be consistent. The customer should experience your brand the same way whether they’re in a retail store, shopping online, or browsing your Instagram account on their cell phone.
The messaging in your advertising must align with your messaging that’s already out there, like your website and social media profiles. The advertisements you create in order to push your brand messaging should be in the same voice as the text on your website and social media profiles.
If your customer sees an ad for your brand on Google that’s written in a different voice from your radio ads, customers will have a hard time understanding your brand overall. Consistent messaging helps customers remember your brand and create a relationship with it.
Suggested Reading: hubsell Review – Multi-Channel Sales Automation Tool
Multi-Channel Marketing Examples
Starbucks is a great example of a brand using multi-level marketing to deliver consistent messaging across multiple platforms.
Their brand messaging is spread across their social media accounts, tv commercials, loyalty app, website, and brick-and-mortar stores.
Starbucks makes contact with their customers at several different channels, and they provide the same brand messaging at each touchpoint. Their customers have an understanding of the brand and all they have to offer through following their social media accounts, participating in the loyalty app, purchasing products at their stores, and ordering in the drive-thru. Their experience is consistent across each of these platforms.
Apple is a great example of how to expertly utilize multi-channel marketing across online and offline avenues. Apple’s various channels include their website, stores, technical support, apps, social media, and streaming platform.
The experience customers have in Apple’s brick-and-mortar stores is seamless with their online experiences too.
In addition to their in-person and online stores, Apple added their streaming service, Apple TV, to their portfolio. As a subscriber to Apple TV, customers can expect to have the same experience with the brand on their streaming platform that they would have on any other one of their apps. With a brand as big as Apple, customers have certain expectations.
The experience customers have across each of Apple’s offline and online platforms is consistent with their experience using their products.
Conclusion
There’s almost an infinite number of marketing strategies you can use to boost your business. Multi-channel marketing, not to be confused with omnichannel marketing, is a strategy that targets multiple channels for reaching customers. The strategy behind multi-channel marketing is to reach as many people as possible in their desired method.
A few multi-channel marketing strategies for increasing sales are to know your target audience, target specific channels, and have consistent messaging. Narrowing down who your target audience is will help you better understand where your audience spends their time and where you should spend your marketing dollars.
The brand messaging across each of these platforms needs to be consistent in order to create brand awareness and increase sales.
A couple examples of brands who properly use the multi-channel marketing strategy are Starbucks and Apple. Both companies offer their customers seamless experiences both offline and online as they interact with the brand.
The multi-channel marketing strategies and examples discussed in this article are designed to help you increase your sales and brand awareness.