How many channels should your cross-channel marketing include?

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A question I often get asked is, “How many channels are enough channels?” This question is completely valid, as most brands are looking to squeeze the most out of limited resources, though you probably can guess what I’m about to say: there is no right or wrong answer.

Giving a set blanket number of channels for all business types wouldn’t make sense, as each organization has a unique set of goals and challenges. What it really comes down to is how able you are to connect those channels with one another and integrate them into your marketing system.

Even still, you might have multi-channel efforts happening alongside your cross-channel efforts—as it’s not be possible to connect every single channel and effort. So if you’re not sure how many ad channels to use, here are some things to consider:

Budget

Your marketing budget will determine how much or how little you may be able to put towards each of your desired channels. This is not to say that those with monster marketing budgets should be blasting themselves across as many channels as possible, or that lower budget marketing equates to fewer channels. Think more about how you’ll allocate budget towards each channel depending on your needs.

If you need help calculating this, we have plenty of resources on it like this post on creating your marketing budget. However, a good rule of thumb is that 5-10% of your revenue should go towards your marketing budget. For larger businesses, that number could climb to 14% or higher.

Audience

Picture your ideal customer when you’re picking your channels. How many channels do they use? What does their day-to-day lifestyle look like? Where do they live, and how old are they? Asking yourself exploratory questions like this about your audience can help you determine how many channels you need in order to effectively reach them at each step of the way.

Goals

Your business’s marketing objectives will also impact how many channels you choose. For example, if you’re looking to increase your online presence, you may need to add social media as an additional channel for your strategy—even if you’ve never tried it before.

Resources

Time will also be a factor because, at the end of the day, one individual or team can only do so much. However, you may have other tools at hand that can make cross-channel management easier. See if you might have a way to summarize your reporting across channels, or if there are any platforms you can use to send out multiple marketing assets at once.

How to create a cross-channel marketing strategy

You might be wondering: is cross-channel marketing easy to achieve? Short answer: yes. You can do it all! Here are our ten tips to finding cross-channel marketing success for your business:

1. Map out your customer journey

Before you dive into cross-channel marketing, it’s important to get a bird’s eye view of your sales funnel. Understanding your consumers’ behavior at each step of the buyer’s journey will help you to identify which offers best align with each stage.

Look at historical data and information your business may have on how past customers may have converted. You could also leverage your audience analysis to put yourself in your customers’ shoes and brainstorm the steps they may take to ultimately commit to your business.

Not only will this help you tailor your cross-channel marketing to specific scenarios throughout the customer journey, but it will also help you to narrow down which channels are best (more on this next).

2. Have an offer funnel

The key to cross-channel marketing is aligning your offers with each stage of the funnel. Someone at the top of your funnel is more likely to be open to a guide on how to do something than a demo on how to use your product. Or even within the guide category, they may be more receptive to a high-level overview on something than a more technical one on ways to do it. So be sure to map out different offers and topics to the stages of your customer journey. This will look different for every business, but here’s a loose example:

3. Choose your channels

Using our guidelines above may have helped you narrow down the number of channels you’ll be looking to use, so now it’s a matter of which channels. Here at Pixel Art, we believe in working smarter, not harder. Your best bet would be to pick channels that will work better together to maximize your results.

For example, search marketing and social media marketing complement one another. When someone sees your posts pop up on social, that may trigger them to search for you later to learn more. Think back to your ideal buyer persona to understand which channels they may be hitting the most frequently, and that should help you uncover which ones are best for your business.

To help get you started, here are some possible channels to consider:

Website
SEO
PPC
Social media marketing
Social media advertising
Display advertising
Remarketing
Print ads
Email marketing
Mailers
Geofencing
Live chat
Messaging apps
OTT advertising
Video marketing
Content marketing

cross-channel marketing - chart of channels to consider for a cross-channel marketing strategy

4. Take inventory of your costs

Be ready to be flexible with your budget as you implement cross-channel marketing. The performance of your channels might ebb and flow, so you may need to reallocate your budgets accordingly.

To help you get a sense of how much to spend on each channel, use industry benchmarks to estimate costs. Check in on these reports frequently to troubleshoot your spend or to see how your business stacks up throughout your marketing journey.

5. Have a set of overarching goals

While each channel may achieve different things, having a couple of “big picture” goals can help you to unify your efforts. It can be easy to get bogged down in the deep performance details of each channel. Overarching goals help to hold yourself accountable for keeping your channels on track for success.

6. Use a CRM

A customer relationship management (CRM) tool can work wonders for your cross-channel marketing. As your prospects’ behavior evolves, a CRM will allow you to track those changes and recognize broader trends in the customer journey. It will also make it easy for you to segment your campaign audiences so you can customize your offers.

7. Use retargeting

Speaking of which, retargeting is a must-have for any cross-channel marketing strategy. There are a number of retargeting audiences you can try out. For example, you might run a retargeting Facebook ad for a product that someone added to their cart but did not purchase. Or you might run a specific promotion for your most loyal customers.

8. Button up your tracking

Be sure you implement tracking parameters across every channel you leverage in your cross-channel marketing strategy. Not only will this allow you to see how each channel, offer, and placement is working, but it will also allow you to set rules in your marketing automation. For example, if a person downloads guide X, show them thank you page A with offer B.

The naming convention you use for tracking is completely up to you—what’s most important is you have an easy and reliable way to consistently know how your performance is pacing across channels. And on a related note, make sure you resolve all your conversion tracking hangups for search engine marketing as this can make or break your campaigns.

9. Use multi-touch attribution

Attribution modeling determines how the different channels involved in a customer’s journey will be credited. For cross-channel marketing, it’s best to go with one that falls under the multi-touch attribution umbrella. Since you’ll be encouraging customers to take specific actions across channels, you’ll want to see the impact your campaigns have on the entire customer journey. Multi-touch attribution modeling helps you to do so by using data across channels to weight certain actions more than others.

10. Keep your reporting all in one place

To make cross-channel marketing more manageable and effective, unify your reporting efforts. Use free tools like Google Analytics to understand how your platforms are performing in one space. Not only does this save you time, but it also helps you to understand how all your channels are performing both against and in concert one another.

cross-channel marketing - example of google analytics channel mapping

Here is one example of how Google Analytics displays success by channel in multiple different ways.

11. Try nurture email campaigns

While it’s great you have cross-channel materials at the ready to move customers along in their journey, some people may need a bit more of a nudge than others. Targeted email marketing is a great go-to for this situation since you can segment out your lists and offers accordingly. You could even automate your emails to send once someone completes a specific step in your funnel. This is an easy default strategy to boost your cross-channel marketing and keep customers engaged.

12. Be patient

The hardest part of cross-channel marketing is patience! Some channels may bring you results more quickly than others. This is precisely why choosing a variety of channels is so important.

One channel, PPC advertising, may help you reach your business’s short-term goals while others, like local SEO, will bring you results in the long term. Treating your cross-channel marketing like a living, breathing project that’s ongoing will help you to set realistic expectations and make the most of your results along the way.

Cross-channel marketing is easier than you think

Many don’t consider successful cross-channel marketing feasible for their business. However, this complete cross-channel marketing guide proves that it can be a viable strategy for anyone. With a bit of self-evaluation, patience, and the help of online tools or platforms, your cross-channel marketing strategy can help you to gain and retain customers for sustainable business growth.

To recap, here is how to do cross-channel marketing effectively: