Why cross channel marketing is a necessity for winners?
By nature, marketers are proactive. They need to understand market first and then create relevant messages, delivering brand promise. But it is ambiguous. Let’s break this down a bit.
If you’re a marketer and you ‘think’ what your users like, and force your messages on them- you’re not a proactive marketer, no matter how much you brag about your marketing genius. You’re just being ignorant.
Okay, now if you say that you study your marketing reports, and understand your customers, you’re taking right steps towards enlightenment. And if you do it on the basis of one marketing campaign you conducted once upon a time, you’ve a long way to go.
And now, if you say that you regularly push out email campaigns and study customer behavior, and plan your activities, you’re good but still not the best modern-day marketer.
Where is the problem now, you ask? Well, pushing email campaigns and studying customer insights only show a part of the picture. You need to see how the same customer reacted to your social media posts and mobile marketing stunts simultaneously.
That’s cross-channel marketing.
Today, customers engage with your brand through multiple channels. They read your emails, follow your social feeds, and even checks out any SMSs you’ve sent to them. But do you think as a marketer, all your activities are in sync?
Let’s take an example. John is a crazy football fan and he always wanted to watch his local team in action live in the stadium. He couldn’t make last year because the ticket prices were too high. This year, too, doesn’t look good with the ticket prices. You’re an event ticket seller. You noticed that John has subscription with your newsletter and has always opened your mails, but not bought any tickets. You also noticed that John answered to your twitter poll and commented on your facebook post about the match. As a marketer, John looks like a very hot lead.
But why is John not buying the ticket? What can you do to make that happen?
If you understood John’s behavior, you know that he is very much interested in this match. He lives in the same city but yet he hasn’t bought the ticket yet. There maybe quite a few reasons for that, like he might not be in town that day, he might be busy with some personal work or ticket prices are just too high for him. As a marketer, you can create personalized message for John and see how he reacts. So, the next email which you sent him, you attached a discount coupon of 20% which solves the monetary issue of John and he finally buys the ticket.
Not only you made a sale, but also you made a die-hard fan happy.
All you did here is understand a customer’s cross channel behavior to talk to him in a personalized manner. That is what modern age marketing is all about.
It’s pretty simple. If you’re talking to your customers through different mediums, understand their activities across mediums. Don’t judge your customers based on one marketing channel.
So, if you’re looking to get an “Oscar for Best Marketer”, start with the followings:
Integrate your channels: Make your cross-promotional efforts work with integrated marketing in which different mediums compliment each other.
Set-up multiple touch points: One of the benefits of multi-channel marketing is the ability to create multiple number of touch points, which then provide additional customer data that can help you design future marketing activities.
Study the holy customer insights, religiously: Without a proper customer insight readings, John would never had bought the tickets. In cross channel marketing, you have to follow your customer insights regularly, study how they are reacting to your campaigns across channels. This will open a Pandora-box-of-personalized-targeting-opportunities for you. wooh!
Prepare your speech: Once you align your marketing activities across channels, you would start to know your customers better. This will convert into more leads and subsequently more revenue for your business. Surely, your boss is going to give you big appreciation. Prepare your acceptance speech but don’t take that night for granted 😉
Throughout this read, if you were wondering how to integrate your cross channel marketing efforts, we have this awesome solution for you – FirstHive. It’s a cross channel marketing platform that enables marketers to create and execute email marketing, SMS marketing and social media marketing campaigns, and, at the same time, to keep track of their cross channel activities from a single dashboard. Sign-up for 30-days and try for yourself. Psst! It’s free.
