With customers on multiple types of media, even within a single day, an integrated multichannel marketing approach ensures your message cuts through the clutter with repetition and reinforcement. Using an array of marketing channels, from websites and digital ads to email and in-store promotions, not only builds a cohesive case for your brand, it inspires more sales. One study found that customers spend two to five times more when brands target them using multiple channels.
Is multichannel marketing right for your brand? Let’s look a little closer at what you stand to gain by leveraging your brand’s content in a multi-faceted way.
Choose the Channels Right for You
The key to a successful multichannel approach that gets the most eyes and clicks on your brand is a good strategy based on your audience and your offering. If you hope to attract a Gen Z audience, for example, leaning heavily on digital and social channels is a smart way to go since that audience is extremely engaged with the latest social platforms and spends abundant time online.
If you’re offering products or goods, you’ll want to make sure to have an anchor that your preferred channels direct buyers towards, like a shoppable website, an e-comm product page, social storefront on Instagram or Facebook, or a traditional brick-and-mortar store. Apple is a best-in-class example of how to take the buyer experience to the next level with a consistent, easily recognizable aesthetic and simple-to-understand content across multiple channels. It also has an immersive in-store experience that relies less on a hard sell as it does enhancing customers’ visits through knowledgeable staff, hands-on displays and even in-depth, live tech sessions. By the time customers go to Apple’s website or an e-comm channel to purchase product, they are already firm in their decision because of how richly they’ve been educated already within other channels throughout the shopper journey.
If you’re offering a valuable service, having an anchor that directs traffic is still a great idea, especially if your goal is to build awareness or engagement. Potential clients or customers will need an easy-to-navigate way to learn more about your brand, so building a multichannel campaign around an ownable website is a great start. For example, if you’re a new business owner and want to drive buyers to your brick-and-mortar store to showcase your services and build relationships, first create a website with eye-catching visuals and copy that clearly states your business’ offerings. From there, you can repurpose your website’s content on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to drive even more traffic back to your site and into your store. Then, once you have the budget for it, you can invest in targeted ads and banners on relevant websites and social channels to expand your reach even further.
Budget
Creating content to live on multiple channels might sound intimidating to marketers with a smaller budget, but there are smart ways to get more out of your investment. Like consulting a social expert/creator to help you craft impactful content that can be repurposed across all the social platforms you plan on using. For example, if you are a homebuilder and want to post on Instagram to entice potential buyers in a new neighborhood, a socially savvy expert can help you plan content that includes clever captions and eye-catching photos, then turn your captions into Tweets. Then simply remove the hashtags and add URLs to share that same Instagram post to Facebook.
If you plan on a larger media buy, like paid ads on social media, bumper videos on a video channel like YouTube or TikTok, digital ads on relevant sites where your customers frequent, or a mix of other channels like point-of-sale in-store, print or TV, the best plan is to target those channels that make the most sense for your campaign or marketing push. London-based fashion retailer Topshop took this strategic, multichannel approach during London Fashion Week by creating a series of digital billboards near their brick-and-mortar stores to promote their latest catalog. Then, they synced up the billboards with Twitter by creating a unique hashtag, #LFW, so that when passersby used it, it would pull up the Tweet and an item from its catalog to encourage traffic to the stores. For this smart effort, Topshop earned a 75% boost in revenue for the lookbook outfits related to the hashtag.
Timing
Another thing to consider is timing. When do you want your campaign to launch? For example, launching near a major holiday can be a good thing, especially if your brand offers shoppable products, but it can be an expensive time to compete for ad performance in the social feeds. Know your audience and when they are most likely online to guide when you post organic content. With paid or boosted content, your campaign will be in market over time, and the exact day or time of launch is less of a consideration.
Stay True to Your Brand
When it comes down to it, you know your brand best, so stay true to it. Don’t leverage any channel that won’t optimize your business goals and get the most ROI or engagement with your brand, no matter if a competitor is. Luckily, with a multichannel approach, there’s no one right mix of channels to utilize. You might find that a video channel like YouTube, combined with seamless content on an Instagram page and POS in-store is the magic combination for driving buyers to purchase. Take the time to research your audience, find out where their interests lie, then meet them where they are at in order to build a loyal following. Then, you can monitor the results of your multichannel campaign and recalibrate if necessary based on performance to optimize your reach and ultimately, drive even bigger sales.
Interested in a few new ideas for tuning up your multichannel strategy? Let’s talk! Reach out to Barbara at barbara@wickmarketing.com or (512) 479.9834.
