The importance of a Multi-channel approach is unhidden, and most organizations know it. However, only a few believe they’ve successfully implemented one. Nowadays, every individual is engaged on numerous media platforms and devices daily making it more challenging for marketers to provide a consistent customer experience. To keep the customers consistent across these channels marketers are adopting multichannel marketing.
Running a multi-channel digital marketing campaign makes more sense and is important to businesses than ever before as it allows them to understand consumer behavior and their interaction across different platforms. Incorporating a multi-channel marketing campaign with relevant ads helps achieve ROI goals and can greatly enhance your chances of success. The more you do multichannel marketing the more you boost your marketing better.
It’s time to update your marketing strategy! Brands worldwide are recognizing the need for multi-channel communications to help their company climb aboard the trend.
What is multi-channel?
Multi-channel communication in business encapsulates both indirect and direct communications. It refers to a company’s way of communicating with its customers over several different platforms, hoping to ignite interest in their customers for that particular brand. These multi-channel platforms include email, social media, SMS, and more.
How multi-channel is different from Omni-channel?
Though both methods multichannel and omnichannel rely on multiple platforms to interact with customers, the former method focuses on each platform as an individual strategy, while the latter focuses on building a seamless customer experience across all platforms.
For example, Omnichannel communication allows its customers to move from a WhatsApp chat to a phone call seamlessly without providing any additional details or without having to start from the beginning.
Both the platforms available to marketers can be online and offline, allowing marketers to combine a huge variation to target potential buyers. The best business idea is to already use multiple channels as their marketing strategy. However, most of them forget to strategize this multi-channel or use them to their maximum potential. This is where marketers lose opportunities.
Why is multi-channel strategizing important for marketing?
According to surveys conducted more than 70% of consumers wanted to connect with the brands on multiple channels before making a purchase. So, it’s best to have a presence on as many platforms as possible. What are the channels on which you can focus for your multichannel communication strategy?
- Phone
- Mobile Apps
- SMS
- Web portal
- Print (brochures, flyers, mail, etc)
There are plenty of reasons a multi-channel approach will boost your business and benefit your industry. Here are a few of the benefits you’ll experience.
- Promotes brand awareness – The more you are present on multi-channel, the more likely people can reach your brand and recognize your brand when they see you again. With your presence across multiple channels, you are providing your customers with more touchpoints and opportunities to engage with them by giving information that is valuable to them.
- It allows you to put the prospect first without any hassle – A multi-channel approach means, higher engagement rate from your consumers. By catching the prospect at the best moment and in the best way you can increase your ability to serve customers where they are already spending their time. Not everyone responds to their emails actively some customers might be busy professionals who prefer SMS, while others may prefer a phone call. covering all the areas online and offline allows your prospect to discover your brand in the way they find most convenient.
- Increased number of audiences – Multi-channel approaches allow you to broaden your reach to different audiences often with little to no extra cost. Multiple ways to engage have more paths to convert a prospective customer that leads to a sale.
- Speeds up the process– A positive lead may interact multiple times with the company before they feel ready to speak to a sales rep and can be a time-consuming approach. However, with a multi-channel approach, this step can be sped up enormously- as you start to appear everywhere they look which makes a strong presence in their mind.
- Collect data through multi-channel analytics: By employing a multi-channel approach, you can gain insight into the buying habits of your customers and thus have a better grasp of your earned media. You can use this data to mold it and shape it the way you want to boost your sales.
- Saves money: With proper management of multi-channel strategy, business owners can better target specific demographics and behaviors to find the right mix. This will help marketers deliver the lowest CPA (Cost Per Acquisition), thus helping achieve a faster return on the amount invested.
What are the benefits?
- Return on investment:Companies opting for multi-channel B2B campaigns have reported an average increase of 24% in ROI. 50% of marketers running their business on multi-channel have said that they have reached their financial targets. Companies with a strong multi-channel approach have seen an increase of 9.5% in their annual revenue leading to ever growth of ROI
- Improved Campaign performance:Businesses using more than 4 online platforms have been found to outperform the businesses by 300% who are using single or dual channels. It is because multi-channels allow you to stay on top of your business by helping you constantly test new ideas and evolve through risks.
- Longevity: Last year data revealed that around 80% of users access the web to make purchases via smartphones and 30% used smart TVs. Businesses using multiple channels can cope up with changes faster as they always have a backup plan ready to ensure such targets are met.
- Entice buyers: Multi-channel marketing strategy allows marketers to generate leads faster as it allows them to study and solve a specific problem ahead instead of just browsing.
Are there any drawbacks of multi-channel marketing?
When the matter is about getting your company’s message to reach the modern world, you have several options, especially the marketing channels. Multiple marketing channels are being utilized by several businesses and big corporations nowadays. Marketers are using several marketing channels to reach a large audience base and increase the effect of the whole strategy.
Even though this approach has numerous benefits, drawbacks are also significant and must be taken into consideration.
1. Expensive for small-size businesses: Many small to midsize businesses cannot run a fully-fledged multi-channel marketing campaign because they don’t have the technical capabilities. Adding, editing, managing content across various channels can be frustrating and require different technical skills to run them all to full efficiency. Both marketing commitments and costs increase when a business succeeds, and the number of channels also increases. With this, the expenses on multi-marketing channels rapidly become a burden. This becomes a drawback.
2. Less focus: More the number of marketing channels your business uses to spread the brand message, less is the focus on each marketing effort. This is true mainly for small businesses. In maximum cases, it occurs because of a lack of a dedicated marketing department.
3. Mixed messages: It is tough for businesses engaged in campaigns that use multiple channels to maintain a consistent marketing message all the time. But consistency is important for establishing product identification and prestige and developing loyalty among the customer base.
4. Arrangement: Making perfect arrangements for things involved in marketing campaigns distributed among marketing channels will always remain a challenge. Each kind of campaign and each promotion has its development, end, and distribution plan. Keeping track of what is running, how it is running is a challenge for many small businesses. It is true, especially for those who are managing things without a specified marketing sector. Paying external contracts that are the outcome of multiple marketing channels is another portion of the whole arranging process that can be challenging as well as time-consuming.
So, these are some of the drawbacks of multichannel marketing. Multichannel marketing can lead to some of the great things for your company but until you navigate each of them successfully. It is important to consider whether the medium works for your brand or not. How best you can communicate your voice as well as values also matters a lot. The more you are prepared, the more is the chance of successes