0
0
Every Channel, One Strategy: Is Cross-Channel Marketing the Ultimate Power Move?
Unless you went to clown college (props to you if you did), you probably struggle to pull off the classic “juggling act” of marketing your business as much as possible. However, it doesn’t always have to feel like you’re performing tricks to market your business successfully across the board. Today, I’m going to show you how you can market your business for maximized success without jumping through hoops. The secret is cross-channel marketing. Now, just hearing that word may raise some questions—which I’ll provide the answers to, like:
Let’s jump right in!
What is cross-channel marketing?
In order to understand cross-channel marketing, you first have to be familiar with marketing channels—which are all the various places you could promote your business both online and offline. You may be using more channels than you think, as any time you communicate with your target audience is an opportunity to market your brand. This means that anything like radio advertising placements, live chat on your website, your social media platforms, online search ads, and more could all be considered marketing channels.
Cross-channel marketing means you’re leveraging multiple placements, platforms, or other forms of communication to promote your brand holistically across your sales funnel. It focuses on the customer journey—meaning you’re customizing your offers on each channel to their stage in the funnel. It takes your marketing a step further where you’re not only using multiple marketing channels, but also making sure each of them align to create a seamless, customer-centric marketing experience.
What’s the difference between cross-channel and multi-channel marketing?
Cross-channel marketing often gets confused with multi-channel marketing, so here’s a quick breakdown: With multi-channel marketing, you use multiple channels to reach your customer but the channels don’t share information with one another. You may still be maintaining brand consistency across channels, but your offers may not always align with where the customer is at in their journey. With cross-channel marketing, the multiple channels do share information with one another, so the offer a person sees on any given channel is determined by their previous engagement with your business (on any other channel).
See the difference? In the cross-channel strategy, you have curated material that meets your customers’ needs across their journey. This means that, while a multi-channel marketing strategy is important, you’ll ideally want some of those channels to be involved in a cross-channel system.
Benefits of cross-channel marketing
While we touched on some of the pros to cross-channel marketing above, you may also want to consider these statistics when deciding if this strategy is right for you:
- The average consumer needs to interact with a brand at least seven times before they become a customer. Cross-channel marketing helps you to make each of those encounters super-relevant, potentially even reducing the number of encounters needed..
- 87% of consumers want brands to provide more consistent experiences. With multi-channel marketing, your content is siloed for each platform. Whereas with cross-channel marketing, you’ll be able to provide a seamless brand experience throughout the buyer’s journey.
- Brands using three or more marketing channels see a 287% higher conversion rate.
- Businesses that engage with people across multiple channels see nearly 90% of their customers returning for more later. This means that cross-channel marketing can increase your brand loyalty over time.
Clearly, cross-channel marketing is a non-negotiable when it comes to reaching your mar
