Brands are using multichannel marketing more than ever to better engage with consumers. In a time where customer acquisition continues to be a valuable metric for success, marketers use this approach to navigate a complex digital landscape to deliver great experiences that reflect the lives of customers.
What is Multichannel Marketing?
Simply put, multichannel marketing is the process of customer engagement through a wide variety of direct and indirect channels. This can include websites, search engines, social media, email, mobile, promotional events, conventional storefronts, and direct mail, just to name a few.
This approach allows customers who start researching about a product or service on their laptop or mobile phone to take the next step on their path to purchase from another device or channel. In other words, multichannel marketing provides seamless transition between channels and devices, while ensuring consistent messaging across a brand’s overall presence.
At its core, it enables businesses to reach and satisfy customers on the customers’ channel of choice. As you create your multichannel marketing strategy, it’s important to keep some best practices in mind that can help drive awareness and get the leads you need.
Multichannel Marketing Best Practice 1: Reduce Friction
Consumers are always eager to learn more about a brand’s products and services, but that enthusiasm is easily derailed If their experience with accessing a website or watching a video on your latest offering is more complicated than it seems. Reducing friction, or the barriers that impede a better customer experience, is an easy way to approach your multichannel marketing efforts. Solutions for reducing friction come in many forms:
- Add captions to your videos
- Ensure that the images included display well for multiple devices
- Use links that are short or easy to remember
Taking steps to ensure that engagement from the beginning is easy for the consumer can pay off in the long run because people are always willing to learn more about a brand if it appeals to them. Reducing friction at the beginning of that interaction means that consumers are more likely to see what you have to offer. Speaking of engagement…
Multichannel Marketing Best Practice 2: Be Engaging
To effectively get the attention of your target audience, create content that garners attention and shows off brand offerings in an appealing way. This small step for your marketing team can be a giant leap in consumer engagement.
Fortunately, there are plenty of effective pieces of engaging content including:
- Creating a poll on social media
- Asking questions in a message that relates to your product solution
- Opening channels to consumer feedback
It’s also important to note that your opening salvo of engagement must also meet the “natural” way that consumers engage on specific platforms. What might work on Facebook and Twitter, might not be as effective in an email, but you don’t need to reinvent the wheel with each channel. Ensure that your forms of engagement work on every channel to save time and money.
Multichannel Marketing Best Practice 3: Use Customer Feedback
A customer reviews finding showed that more than 92% of consumers use online reviews to guide their purchase decisions. As part of your engaging content and reducing friction, your team should use authentic customer reviews to highlight the success of your brand. These forms of feedback are the powerful social proof that shows consumers that real people enjoyed your brand to the point that they left a glowing review.
These reviews are not just a part of your brand identity and a contributing factor to your local SEO presence; they can help you bring in more customers, especially in select channels. Another customer review statistic shows that 40% of digital consumers will look to social networks when researching new brands of products. In other words, using your rave reviews combined with your latest offerings can work wonders for customer acquisition in multiple channels.
Get Started with Your Multichannel Marketing Strategy Today
Brands use business review sites to expand their online presence, and marketing teams need to use multiple channels as well to reach today’s consumers. Every brand will have their own approaches on each platform, but it’s important to have these three foundational practices in mind so that consumers are easily attracted and are eager to learn more about what your brand has to offer.
