We all know multi-channel marketing is important, but what is the reason for it? The answer is simple, so you can be where your customers are. And they are everywhere. After acknowledging that your customers exist, the next important step is understanding how they think and process things. Gone are the days when customers could be reached through newspapers and big billboards. In today’s world, you will find your target market in one single place: the internet.

Over the years, trends have changed. Today, users look to be in complete control while making purchasing decisions. And there is no doubt that end users have more power than marketers when laying out the buying process.

Thanks to the proliferation of available channels, customers have many choices when it comes to getting information on a product and weighing out all possible alternatives. Hence, businesses must ensure they are getting through to the right customer with the right product at the right time. And, this can only be done by choosing the right marketing channel. What makes this challenging is the variety of channels available to reach customers, which is more than one could have imagined not so long ago.

With time, the number of channels will only rise, and with a rise in mediums, demand will rise. Soon, the need to incorporate customer-driven marketing platforms will be not just a good idea, but a critical one.

This is where the Customer-Driven Marketing Solution by Confiz comes in. We can help execute consumer-focused campaigns and provide a tailored brand experience to increase conversions for your business, and make your customers’ journey highly personalized and memorable through our state-of-the-art marketing solution and its dynamic modules.

The evolution of a multi-channel customer engagement platform

By definition, multi-channel marketing is a strategy that combines paid and owned media to engage customers in your brand. What to use out of the two options is a very important question. Statistics show that 72% of consumers prefer to connect with businesses using a multi-channel marketing strategy. The benefits that come with adopting a multi-channel approach are huge. From increasing brand awareness to improving user interactions, from a strong integrated marketing strategy to being available for your customers, it lets you do it all.

Businesses should be aware of the potential multi-channel marketing can have on their marketing strategy. As good as it may sound, it does not come easy. So, what does it take to do multi-channel marketing right? Let’s dive into the four keys to success.

Four Steps to Getting it Right

Create and maintain a single view of the customer

Having a single view of your customer is important. That is because, in today’s world, customers interact with your brand in multiple ways rather than one touch point. Having in-depth insights and information on your customers is vital to ensure you become the best at your work. You should have data on how they behave across all channels and every touch point, but make sure not to forget to understand what each customer’s value is to you.

To get a single customer view, it may help to establish a centralized marketing data mart that consolidates all customer data in one place regardless of the source. Understanding the difference between having a lot of customer data and having a single view of the customer is important. Both things are not the same. Remember to not get distracted; just gathering data will not cut it, you need to know what to do with it. Secondly, customers change, and businesses change. Your customers’ views will evolve and grow over time. So, working with the same data for a long period of time will be useless. Continuously updating your data, bringing in new data, and building new models will help keep you ahead of the game.  

Establish a multi-channel marketing platform

When marketers create a strategy that ties together campaigns from multiple media channels, it creates opportunities for more impactful messages that are mindful of the customer journey. However, there are certain processes and technology you should keep in mind when establishing a multi-channel marketing platform to support your various marketing activities:

• Campaign Management: This includes the capabilities needed for segmentation, workflow creation, and campaign execution.
• Advanced Analytics: This includes predictive analytics and campaign optimizations. ‍
• Advanced Execution: This includes the capabilities needed for content management, event triggering, real-time decision-making, and next-best-offer management for both inbound and outbound marketing programs. ‍
• Response Attribution: This includes creating an optimized marketing mix, scenario planning, and marketing attribution analysis. ‍
• Digital Marketing: This includes the capabilities needed to expand marketing beyond traditional channels to newer channels, including the Web, email, mobile, video, etc.

Once you have a multi-channel marketing platform, integrating traditional and emerging channels will become extremely easy. The process of creating and executing cross-channel campaigns will become simplified. Marketers will now be able to create, in essence, a single campaign that can be replicated across various channels. Helping you hold the core of marketing in your grasp –reaching the right person with the right message through the right channel at the right time. All this, while reducing costs and improving the effectiveness and performance of your marketing efforts.

Automate your processes

Your multi-channel campaigns require timing, especially when you are capitalizing on social media. People may be more active during specific days of the week, or during specific times of the day. Ensuring timeliness is important to ensure your audience gets the same message at the same time and place they are most likely to receive it. To make the process easier businesses can use tools like HubSpot marketing, which allows you to create and schedule a message as well as automate some of your everyday multi-channel campaign processes.

Create consistent customer experiences across all channels

Customer experience is the most powerful differentiator that makes you stand out from your competitors. And while the quality of customer experience is important, consistency is similarly important. That is because your customers experience your brand rather than in parts; whether they interact with you online, in stores, over the phone, or a combination of all these, they want it to be good.

There is no value if your customer has a good online experience but a bad in-store experience; both effects will cancel each other out. This means that rather than getting a potential loyal customer, you have just lost yourself one. To avoid this, you should not treat each channel as a distinct entity so you can show your customers you deliver both consistency and excellence.

Are you ready?

Let us know if you want to learn more about multi-channel customer engagement platforms. Contact us at marketing@confiz.com, and we can help you leverage the platform for maximum results.