The world of marketing is so much important, versatile, and enormous and getting bigger and bigger as the days are passing. It’s becoming very crucial and difficult to target your audience. This is the phase where multichannel marketing comes in handy.
If you’re willing to target every platform your consumers spend time, then you are going to enter the world of multichannel marketing. It is so much valuable tactic for any kind and size of the company. Want to know everything about this marketing strategy, then you’re in the right place, we’re going to cover every aspect of multichannel marketing in this blog.
Let’s get started!
What is Multichannel Marketing?
It is called Multichannel Marketing when a brand connects with its consumers through various different channels whether direct or indirect communications.
We’re passing through the digital era, and we spend our time on different platforms for entertainment, information, and connecting with people. So, according to multichannel marketing, if we’re implementing it, then we can reach a wider audience in varying scenarios. It is also good for the customer that he can reach out to us with no effort.
The channels that we can target in multichannel marketing can be:
- Website
- SMM Platforms (Social Media)
- Newspapers
- Print Advertising (Pamphlets)
- Billboards and Flyers
- Mobile Applications
- Video Advertising
- Business (Brand) Catalogue
- Push Notifications
- Text Messages (SMS)
- Podcasts
- Television
- Radio
- Direct Mail
- Paid Search
- Physical Location
So, we’ve included somewhat every possible channel the consumers can contact you with. Multichannel marketing uses both approaches inbound and outbound marketing. The ultimate goal of multichannel marketing is to provide consumers with the choice to reach out to brands wherever and whenever they want without making efforts. In this whole process, consumers control the whole buying process. They decide from where they want to enter the buying process, and how and on which platform they want to get out.
Well, it’s not an easy task to target various different platforms simultaneously and provide consumers with a seamless experience. For this, every brand needs a strategy that they can follow and provide their customers with the experience they preach.
How to build a multichannel marketing strategy for a brand?
In multichannel marketing, brands need to target various platforms simultaneously for that they need a long-term plan. This long-term plan will help them in spreading brand awareness and increasing engagement with the consumers along with building strong emotional relationships.
Well, we’ve different marketing channels and we need to create content for every channel for the consumers on those platforms. As for this, we need a clear and deep understanding of marketing data to design the right creative content for the audience. This understanding can come only with A/B testing and analysing of the previous marketing data, and can only be achieved by following some simple steps:
Targeting & Understanding the Right Audience after Creating Brand’s User Persona
As we’re communicating with the audiences on different platforms, if we’re not targeting the right audience then all the efforts will go in vain. So, it’s better to make the user persona before implementation.
As multichannel marketing is all about giving users a choice to connect with us on whichever platform they want. For this, first, we need to understand our users and gather data about them. We need to find out where and how our users consume content, and on which platform they spend their valuable time.
After that, we can plan our multichannel marketing strategy around those particular platforms. This way they will make spontaneous purchases without feeling pushy because they feel like it’s their choice.
Develop & Study Analytics
Develop customer data from surveys and forms or collect it from various data platforms, and perform analysis on it. Analysis helps us in creating targeted marketing messages. Using this you can create a personalized marketing strategy for various platforms based on personal, behavioural and demographic consumer data. This strategy will boost consumer engagement along with user experience.
Integrating Marketing Teams for Seamless Communication
As we’re performing multichannel marketing campaigns that target many platforms at once, it’s obviously different teams would be working on different platforms. As result, some problems generate like communication disruption and hindrance in the collaboration process. Silos are developed naturally within the organization because of team members’ loyalty only towards the team and not sharing the marketing material and data with other teams.
We need to break down these barriers, and this can be possible if all the teams are working in unison. Breaking down existing silos will help in integrating marketing teams for seamless communication within the organization.
Creating Brand Style Guide for Consistent Brand Messaging
If you’re willing to establish your business as a brand, then creating a brand style guide is the first and must thing. It will help all the marketing teams also to deliver a consistent brand message on all platforms.
It’ll keep team members on a single page in what colours to be used, font, and what types of visual graphics should be used and when. This way, the businesses can develop their own design system that works seamlessly. If you want to know how to create a brand style guide then click here.
Choosing the Right Channels for Marketing
Choosing the right platforms can be a great start for the success of a multichannel marketing campaign. The choice of the channels differs for every company. It depends on the needs, and values of the company, and also on which platform their consumers are spending their time.
For getting a rough idea and analysis you can use the current platforms you’re working on. It’ll provide you with a good and clear idea of what type of content your customers are consuming, and where you need improvements.
Measure the Success from a Multichannel Marketing Platform
After every campaign or a certain period of time, you should measure the performance of your multichannel marketing efforts. It’s better if you can measure it from a single dashboard, for this you need to set up a multichannel marketing platform. It’ll provide you 360-degree customer view based on the marketing data from different channels. After analysing the data, you can perform improvements in the tactics.
Improve and Keep Consistent Brand Messaging & Customer Experience
As everyone says, improvement is better than not trying. So, after measuring all the factors, we need to focus on strong areas, but also workout on the weak areas of the campaign.
One thing more consistency makes you recognizable, so we need to keep brand messaging & customer experience consistent. Consistency doesn’t mean the same texts, same creatives or same content everywhere, but using the same fonts, colours, visual graphics etc.
We’ve discussed the 7 step framework of creating and implementing a multichannel marketing strategy, now let’s move forward and discuss the benefits of multichannel marketing
Benefits of Multichannel Marketing
There are a lot of benefits multichannel marketing provides to businesses. One study claims that multichannel consumers spend 2 to 3 times more than single-channel customers. Let’s explore more about the benefits of multichannel marketing;
- Providing Choice to Customers: In reality, multichannel marketing is about giving control of the sales process to the hands of the user. In the whole sales process, customers will have a choice of entering and exiting the sales process anywhere and anytime they want. They will at least have free will in the sales process.
- Expanded Reach & Increased Awareness: Because of targeting multiple platforms at a time, multichannel marketing targets the masses through different channels and markets. Being active on every possible platform, our consumers are spending time, increasing awareness of the businesses. So, in simple words expanded reach means increased awareness.
- Increased Engagement: As there are multiple platforms in it, so has the increased number of consumer touchpoints. Engagement is increased because consumers can connect to the brand on whichever platform they want.
- Increased Effectiveness: Well, having a web presence on the channels our customers are active will make our business more effective. Our strategy will be more impactful on the users and the brand will be recognizable to every user.
- Consistent and Targeted Messaging: Consistent and Targeted Brand messaging is a challenge many companies are trying to figure out. A multichannel marketing strategy ensures the consistency of brand awareness.
Examples of Multichannel Marketing
Multichannel marketing is being implemented by every brand nowadays. Any brand that comes to your mind is implementing multichannel marketing. Not a single brand is there that isn’t using multichannel marketing right now. For example:
- Netflix
- Amazon
- DigiAvtar
- Flipkart
- Hotstar
I don’t think there’s a meaning in putting the brand names here and telling that they’re the brand using a multichannel marketing strategy. I would say, every brand is using multichannel marketing knowingly or unknowingly.
Let’s move forward and discuss the future of multichannel marketing.
The Future of Multichannel Marketing
As we know now that it is being performed by every company knowingly or unknowingly. Then, isn’t every brand being benefitted from this?
I would say, yes, every brand gets benefits from this strategy in some ways. But if it is done in the right way then it can be quite fruitful for the growth of your brand. So, follow the steps and do what’s been told in the above sections.
But, is it enough to be on all the platforms, and performing the strategy? What can we do more after mastering the multichannel marketing strategy?
It’s the place where Omnichannel marketing enters!
So, what is Omnichannel Marketing? And what’s the difference between Multichannel Marketing and Omnichannel Marketing?
Difference between Multichannel and Omnichannel Marketing
Multichannel marketing is about securing positions on all the different marketing platforms. In multichannel marketing, brands have a good web presence on various different marketing channels, and users can connect with the brands from whichever platform they want.
But, as the expectations of users are increasing and they are expecting seamless unified personalized user experience from the brands across the platforms. For that, we need a shift to Omnichannel Marketing. But it doesn’t make multichannel marketing less valuable than Omnichannel. Because Omnichannel Marketing can be performed well only if multichannel has been performed well, multichannel marketing is the first step we need to take before entering the world of Omnichannel.
Multichannel Marketing is about providing businesses with a solution to reach consumers on various different platforms, but it does not offer a unified seamless personalized experience.
While on the other hand, Omnichannel marketing reaches consumers on different platforms providing them a unified seamless personalized experience so that they feel connected with the business.
Omnichannel marketing starts from where multichannel marketing ends. It’s moving one step ahead in the area of user experience.
Omnichannel marketing connects all the channels of multichannel marketing to provide a unified seamless experience to its users. It also blurs the line between offline and online marketing.
In simple words, Omnichannel marketing is about connecting all the channels and working as a single entity providing personalized & targeted content to its users for a uniform seamless experience. But you can achieve great benefits from it only if you’ve performed multichannel marketing very well because it needs data from previous campaigns to make a better and more successful Omnichannel marketing strategy.
If you want to know more about it, then click here.
I hope you’ve got clear what is the basic difference between Multichannel Marketing and Omnichannel Marketing.
We’ve come so far now let’s conclude the blog!
Wrapping Up
We’ve included everything so far that’s necessary to understand what multichannel marketing is all about, and we’ve understood the difference between multichannel and omnichannel marketing strategies.
If it is performed well then it can be a great tool for the growth of your business. Connect all of your channels and incorporate Omnichannel Marketing after working on Multichannel Marketing for a good amount of time. We wish you success in your future multichannel marketing campaigns.
If you still have any questions then feel free to ask in the comment section, and we’d love to know if you like to leave a comment if the blog is valuable or not.
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