Multichannel marketing strategy: what it is and how to use it to grow sales

Multichannel marketing is reaching the same audience through more than one channel, such as search, email, social media, events and sales outreach, with one consistent message. It grows sales because buyers rarely decide after a single touch. They see you in several places, and each channel does a different job on the way to a purchase.

What is multichannel marketing?

Wikipedia describes multichannel marketing as blending different distribution and promotional channels for the purpose of marketing. The idea is customer choice: people can learn about you, compare and buy in whichever way suits them.

Typical channels include:

• Search: organic results through SEO and paid search ads
• Email: newsletters, nurture sequences and product updates
• Social media: company and employee posts, plus paid social ads
• Content: blog posts, guides, videos and podcasts
• Events: webinars, trade shows and meetups
• Sales outreach: calls, emails and social messages from reps
• Partners and affiliates: referrals from companies and people your buyers trust
• Offline: direct mail, print and out-of-home advertising

For more on the online and offline mix, read online marketing vs offline marketing.

What is the difference between multichannel and omnichannel marketing?

The two terms are often used as if they mean the same thing. They do not.

Wikipedia describes omnichannel as an expansion of multichannel. Most companies start multichannel and move towards omnichannel as their tools and data mature. A related idea is integrated marketing, which focuses on making every channel tell the same story.

Why use more than one channel?

• Buyers research in many places. A B2B buyer might find you through a search, read your newsletter, see a colleague's post about you and then attend a webinar before talking to sales.
• Buying teams have several people. The person who uses your product and the person who signs the contract often spend time in different places.
• One channel is a single point of failure. If your leads all come from one source, a change in an algorithm or ad price can cut your pipeline overnight.
• Channels support each other. A webinar invite works better when the reader already knows your brand from search or social media.

How do you build a multichannel marketing strategy?

1. Know your audience

Start with who you sell to. Look at demographics, such as role, company size and location, and psychographics, such as goals, worries and values. Our guide to market segmentation explains how to split your market into groups worth targeting.

2. Choose the channels your buyers already use

You cannot be everywhere, and you should not try. Ask customers where they look for information, check which sources bring your best leads today, and look at where competitors invest. If your buyers do not read print magazines, skip print. If they search for answers before talking to anyone, invest in search.

Most teams do better starting with two to four channels and running them well than spreading a small budget across ten.

3. Give each channel a job

Channels are not interchangeable. A simple way to plan is by funnel stage:

4. Keep one message, adapt the format

The message should be the same everywhere: the problem you solve, for whom, and why you are different. The format changes per channel. A LinkedIn post, a search ad and a sales email can all carry the same idea in different lengths and tones. If your ads promise one thing and your website says another, buyers lose trust.

5. Connect sales and marketing

In B2B, sales outreach is a channel too. Make sure reps know which campaigns are running and what each lead has already seen. Our guide on aligning sales and marketing covers how to set this up.

6. Measure, then rebalance

Review each channel's contribution every quarter and move budget to what works. The next section explains how.

How do you measure multichannel marketing?

Measuring several channels at once is the hard part, because one deal often involves many touches.

• Tag your links. Add UTM parameters to every link you share. Google Analytics advises always setting utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign.
• Track leads in your CRM. Record the source of each lead and follow it to an opportunity and a closed deal.
• Use attribution to share credit. Google Analytics currently offers three attribution models: data-driven, paid and organic last click, and Google paid channels last click. The first click, linear, time decay and position-based models were removed in November 2023. Data-driven attribution uses your own data to estimate how much each touchpoint contributed to a conversion.
• Use marketing mix modelling for hard-to-track channels. Events, print and word of mouth rarely produce a clean click. Marketing mix modelling estimates each channel's effect from spend and sales over time.

What does a multichannel campaign look like?

Here is a hypothetical example for a software company selling to finance teams:

1. A guide on closing the books faster ranks in search and is promoted with LinkedIn posts from the company and its staff.
2. Readers who download the guide join a short email sequence with a checklist and an invitation to a live webinar.
3. Webinar attendees who fit the ideal customer profile get a personal follow-up from a sales rep within two days.
4. Prospects who visit the pricing page but do not book a demo see retargeting ads with a customer story.

Every step repeats the same promise, faster month-end close, but each channel does a different job.

What mistakes should you avoid?

• Spreading the budget across too many channels to do any of them well
• Copying the same post word for word to every channel
• Letting each channel report its own success with no shared measurement
• Forgetting sales, so reps contact leads without knowing what they have already seen

Done well, multichannel marketing is less about being everywhere and more about being in the right few places, with one message and a clear job for each.