7 Common Myths about Multi-Channel Marketing

Multichannel marketing strategy  definition refers to all the efforts a company puts together to interact and reach customers across channels and various platforms.

Multi-channel marketing campaigns are followed by Omni channel marketing strategies that offer a seamless and integrated customer experience irrespective of how or where the highly potential lead is engaging with the brand. 

Jump Directly to

1 . What is Multi-Channel Marketing?

2. 7 Common Multi-Channel Marketing Myths

3. Benefits of Multi-Channel Marketing

Integrated marketing multi channels is ever evolving with big trends emerging and consumer demands are fast paced.

To help yourself keep up with what your target audience is looking for, you’ll need to connect with them spontaneously and consider creating touchpoints. And if they are spending time on using multiple marketing channels and platforms, you would want to get there too!

What is Multi-Channel Marketing?

Like I mentioned, it is a cross channel integrated marketing programs effort of a brand to stay connected with their leads, highly likely potential customers, and customer data, thus contributing to work towards increased brand awareness. When done correctly, it is able to amplify your business.

Marketing efforts build throughout cross channel together form a unique consumer experience, leveraging your brand-to-customer relationship, smoothen customer journey, and ultimately move customer loyalty to new levels.

The best Multichannel marketing campaigns platforms (online and offline platforms) include:

• Emails
• Landing pages
• SMS campaigns
• Push notifications
• Mobile
• Social media platforms
• Phone calls
• Banner print ads
• Affiliate networks
• Print and TV
• Custom swag boxes

PS: In this article, we will not talk about offline integrated marketing efforts for creating cross channel strategy. But hold on. Are you sure you NEED to move and expand your marketing strategies to all the mentioned online and offline channels?

Your choice of a channels depends on your brand and reaching your customers.

Thanks to marketing automation technology tools, you can now find and learn about your prospects and define a buyer’s persona that (almost) replicates around your target customer. For instance, suppose you get two leads A and B. Here are the two sales paths they chose respectively-

Lead A:

Subscribe for newsletter -> Visit product page -> visit pricing page -> go back to home page -> receive invitation for a webinar -> no activity

Lead B:

Subscribe for newsletter -> visit product page -> immediately visit pricing page -> sign up for demo -> attend the demo -> receive webinar invitation -> sign up for the same and attend it

Clearly, in the end, you know that Lead B is more interested in your products and services. Unlike Lead A, it has invested time in your webinar which indicates a seriousness. A direct phone call will even quickly convert this lead and there will be high chances of purchases made by such lead.

You can sign up with Aritic PinPoint for free and see how multi-channel and cross channel marketing works: develop intuitive landing pages and downloadable assets, scheduling SMS campaigns and effective email marketing campaigns, automated drip push notification campaigns, mobile marketing, and get social media marketing rolling.

Like I said, according to lead behavior, Aritic Pinpoint helps you to ensure marketing-sales alignment by providing exact lead information and easy distribution for sales reps to take over.

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7 Common Multi-Channel Marketing Myths

Thanks to some common myths surrounding this concept, marketers are often confused to see its benefits. So, here are top 7 such common myths of multi-channel marketing; busted in time.

1. Only emails offer good ROI

When it comes to Direct mail, it is a part (an integral part) of your entire marketing approach or strategies as it allows you to reach prospects better, simple, and easy.

If your target audiences are spending time across variety of other preferred big channels or mediums as well, you might want to expand beyond your outreach purpose so that you don’t miss out on your business opportunities for your products and services.

Businesses often use effective Facebook ads to generate additional leads, offering downloadable content via landing pages on your website to capture lead information, schedule SMS campaigns targeting mobile or smartphone users on-the-go, create engagement, and launch drip push notification campaigns to continue the user engagement going on. All these mediums together boost your ROI. Just a single email campaign performance don’t do good to your business to span better. Seriously.

Also Read: 25 Marketing Resources for High Converting Email Campaigns

2. Too many channels = Spamming

Yes, multi-channel marketing means spreading a single message or communication across various channel campaigns programs.

But it doesn’t mean that you’ll have to include another same content, make same design, same color, same wordings across various channels for interacting with audience.

Rather, when you are framing your content, different channels will have a distinct strategic approach or process without changing the key concept. Also, maintaining a consistency in every single design doesn’t mean copy-pasting the same template everywhere.

It refers to get using the same color palette, text fonts, CTAs, and element placement. It isn’t so difficult to see and understand what top value you will be creating by doing it.

3. Many Channels = Tons of Leads

Many channels will means tons of leads instantly in action. This is one fairly common belief most marketers find. Honestly, I wish this was even true. But it isn’t the picture.

Multiple channels increase your outreach, and promise bucket-full leads. That’s not possible, reason.

You can say, within multi-channel marketing strategy, lead acquisition marketing programs picks up. If you tell me that multi-channel marketing programs will increase your lead acquisition and ultimately help your sales team in lead conversion by leaps and bounds, then I beg to differ.

Using all these promotional channels effectively and efficiently is even essential for brands and businesses to overcome challenges. But, as I mentioned earlier, your business may require to improve its presence and engagement across every single promotional channels as it needs to break the brick .

It depends on reason that who your ideal consumers are, what they want from you, how best you managing to reach customers with increased engagement, and provide them solutions to their challenges on time.

Check: Acquire More Leads with Automated Drip Campaigns

4. Copying other’s templates or marketing messages will give me success

Umm no. Copy-pasting doesn’t contribute to the success. What worked for others may not work for you.

You can take inspiration or ideas, but replicating others’ design, message, and content is plain plagiarism and doesn’t add up to effectiveness. You’ll end up facing notice from those who’s templates you are copying around, or worse your audience will know there’s nothing genuine about your approach. You surely don’t want that of course.

We often look up for design examples or campaign examples. The web provide complete resources on best practices for all marketing channels, detailed examples of what kind of color coordination will work for each sector, how to build and place your elements in your landing page or a direct mail template, etc.

Related Guide Read: Best Email Subject Lines: Marketers’ MasterGuide

5. Focus should only be on CONTENT; rest can wait

Another misconception. Let’s end it-Although Content marketing is king, ignoring other aspects will do no good to your marketing strategy, especially in multichannel marketing in customer experience. Take a look at this mail

If GlobalWebIndex decided to send the same response message or communication via an SMS-campaign, it wouldn’t be this long term.

Although the key response message will remain same, probably it will be something as below:

‘The Brand Discovery Trends to Know” – Register for Live Webinar by Experts on September 21, 2017. [registration URL, shortened].

The whole touch point here is, it is not just the relevant content resources. You need to make your landing page devices responsive. You have to maintain a design consistency across variety of channels. And of course, for different channels, the content marketing structure will be different.

If you are just copy-pasting the same content everywhere with no modifications, you are just managing to shoot arrows in the darkness wasting your action.

Also Read: 13 Email Template Design Mistakes to Avoid

6. Social Media Marketing is a separate strategy altogether

Social media marketing is often branded as an independently designed marketing strategy that dominates the web presence in the long term. It is true to some extent because it has its own practices and can run without relying on any other strategy.

However, it cannot alone improve your results, but it can start to serve along as a different channel of their choice, and people will learn about your brand presence at last. It works together with personalized and relevant web content along with SEO strategy, influencer marketing efforts, and personalized branding.

These support key social media strategy and make way for their effectiveness. You can call them the peripheral strategy that is effective and helps marketers find more gaps, thereby widen their outreach using such campaigns across the industry.

7. Multi-Channel marketing is expensive and requires more staff

This is likely one dangerous myth that doesn’t go unnoticed: Multi channel marketing strategy requires more staff.

Why? Because there’s a plethora of different channels and for each one channel of their choice, one person is required. Hence it is costly.

NO. You don’t require that!

Multichannel marketing refers to use of multiple marketing avenues and technology to reach out to your target audience. That doesn’t mean, one person is required to manage every single channel.

Let’s put it like this: As a matter of fact, Aritic PinPoint doesn’t require multiple hands to run along and manage or deliver multiple campaigns. You just need to sit back and configure your settings, and then you are good to go. Whatever number of people you have in your team is enough to get going with your multi-channel marketing solutions on Aritic PinPoint.

Yes, you need the knowledge for understanding your audience’s interests, track their behavior, get insights, and segment them properly. Also, you must identify which of the marketing channels are valuable in terms of performance and giving you the maximum results.

When it comes to the point of cost, each marketing platform technology can be leveraged with organic and/or paid ads. It is your choice which one to cross and which one you want to integrate to start your advertising.

You can run sponsored advertising on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. Or, you can rely on organic search results and keep pushing your envelope to do better. The cost depends on your marketing strategy and initial budgeting that you fix for your efforts directed at future success.

This also include buying a marketing automation tool.

Aritic PinPoint make it easy to start offering a comprehensive feature list at an affordable price. Just saying ?

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Benefits of Multi-Channel Marketing

Isn’t it great to simply stay connected with your prospects simultaneously across multi-channels? Well, that isn’t the only benefit of multichannel marketing you would want to reap. Having said that, there’s more to it.

• It increases your brand visibility. When you opt for multiple channels in the market, you are exposed enough to a lot more opportunities than restricting to one single platform in your market niche. It allows your reach to highly widen, giving your business top exposure and help sales teams in conversion of leads at last.
• You can combine specific channels based on your potential customer preferences fit and implement your marketing efforts accordingly. Moreover, you’ll stay informed and develop the understanding as to which specific channel or which combination of various channels is working better follow in your favour. Multi-channel marketing allow you to be cost-effective. Targeted and measured marketing technology ensures that you start deploying your resources in a effective manner. This automatically brings down your operational cost and lets you sell more.

The indirect use of multichannel marketing. What I’m referring here is the use of ‘cookies’ by brands gives you key customer data.

When potential customers click on your website page for navigation(website homepage, landing page or products and services page), a cookie is placed in their browser. This cookie helps to track lead activities and insights, which in turn allows you understand the preferences and location of that lead.

You can integrate comprehensive information to the buyer’s persona for this lead that will help you grow in long term.

Such information and insights just clear the picture as it aid in analysis and deciding which channels will be of value and become most beneficial one to deliver experiences and connect with that particular lead. We call it ‘remarketing’.

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Your views, please 🙂

Have you opted for Multi-channel marketing approach? Do you still agree with these myths?

If you are aware of any such multi-channel marketing myths that has become hurdle once and stopped you from opting for this strategic process, tell me in the comments below.

PS: If you haven’t yet, try Aritic PinPoint for free. It’s easy and simple to start with for you next campaign.