In the present fast-paced society, most of the clients interact with brands and businesses through a lot of different channels like emails, social media platforms, and so on. Hence, digital marketers must make the most out of different channels as well to engage with their already existing and potential customers.
When it comes to Digital Marketing, the most critical aspect is to connect well with potential customers through their favorite channels for grabbing their attention and keeping them engaged. For achieving this objective, marketers need to have cross channel marketing strategies in place.
Understanding the Term Cross Channel Marketing
The term cross channel marketing refers to the process of coming up with compelling content and linkages, which enable the target audience to interact with the brands and businesses on different platforms. It includes publishing relevant content on various digital platforms to create a synergetic relationship among such platforms and provide the clients with an enriching experience. What digital marketers do is, create linkages between the platforms so that the customers follow a logical progression at the time of making a purchasing decision.
Understanding the Process of Cross Channel Marketing
Cross channel marketing efficiently eliminates the use of promotional messages, which are neither well-organized nor targeted at particular individuals; instead, it leverages various channels, such as social media, text messages, web content, and emails, to name a few, for enriching customer interaction to a great extent. For example, a customer may see a post on Facebook for a new technology product, which further directs him or her to a blog post explaining the features of the product. The blog post, in turn, links to a YouTube video demonstrating the working of the product. In this manner, every digital channel reinforces the other while creating a super-rich customer experience.
It is a matter of fact that yes – marketing channels are interconnected, and the customers keep switching from one channel to another. So, let us now make ourselves familiar with a few top-notch cross channel marketing strategies.
1. Understand your Customers and Collect Information about them
Without any second thoughts, digital marketers need to have a good profile of their customers. You must pay due attention to their buying behavior and find the channels that they frequently visit for seeking information before making purchasing decisions. You need to track and gather customer data to get insights into how the customers interact with your brand. Additionally, you need to put in sincere efforts to understand how your customers like to receive promotional information.
2. Segmentation
After gathering customer data, you need to divide your customers into different groups. You can split the customers based on their browsing habits, shopping preferences, and the channels they use to interact with a brand or business; for instance, you might observe that a few customers are more responsive to a specific marketing campaign than the others, so, you can put them together in one group. The customer data collected shall help you in determining the most crucial segments and ways of optimizing and integrating the marketing campaigns for achieving the best possible results.
3. Customized Marketing
After collecting customer data and splitting the customers into different segments, you need to create interlinked content based on multiple stages of the customers’ purchase journey. For instance, you can efficiently send emails to potential customers with a CTA for guiding them on how to interact well with the sales team.
You can offer exclusive discounts and coupons to the customers who have already viewed your products or services. In the scenario where the customers have already purchased something from your brand, you can make them familiar with the new additions to your catalog or some product features.
If the buyers in a specific segment have varying content consumption habits, then you must create different versions of the same content to serve every customer well. What you can proactively do is use data analytics to come across the most beneficial and effective cross channel marketing strategy and enhance the same with optimized content. Remember, the ultimate objective is to give all segments the content that suits their buying requirements in all aspects.