Multichannel marketing can refer to a lot of different forms of marketing depending on who you talk to. As defined, multichannel marketing is the process of implementing a single marketing strategy across multiple platforms or channels, maximizing your opportunities to reach potential buyers.
Now, multichannel marketing is often referred to as omnichannel marketing, but that’s not exactly true. Multichannel and omnichannel do relate in ways, but they’re also different from one another.
These multiple channels can include a lot of different elements, such as events, emails, online store, chat bots, SMS messages, text, Messenger, What’s App and others. There’s many ways to reach customers and it’s up to you to find the ways customers want to reach your company.
One of the priority goals of multichannel is to give your audience a choice, allowing them to interact with your brand in the way they prefer.
Since Thill is ranked as one of the top multichannel 3PLs (Third-Party-Logistics) companies, this is a topic we know well.
What’s The Benefits Of Multichannel Marketing?
There’s a lot of different benefits as it pertains to multichannel marketing. These are important, so we want to break each one down and let you know why.
- Channel Preference: With so many different channels available for your audience to find products or services like you sell, there’s a real need for your brand to be on the channels your potential customers are using. A multichannel marketing strategy gives you the opportunity to find your customers on the channels they prefer, which is ultimately a main goal for multichannel marketing.
- Brand Awareness: Having the ability to use multiple marketing channels that your customers are using will help you build brand awareness across many platforms. It’s a known fact that you want your products in front of the people that will buy them. Using a channel marketing strategy that leverages multiple platforms gives your brand the ability to have advertising up when customers are ready to make a purchase.
- Consistent Presence: You’ve likely been online looking around and noticed that the websites you’re visiting begin following you with ads. The next thing you know, it feels like they’re everywhere. This is the power of a consistent presence and ultimately attracting your potential customers. A consistent presence can produce consistent results through multiple channels, allowing you to optimize channels that are performing above average.
- Analytics And Data: Using multichannels in your marketing is a great way to collect data and get feedback. The more channels you use, the more data you can collect. Data is vital to analyzing your marketing campaigns and making the proper adjustments. Multichannel marketing is going to allow your business the chance to collect such data and hopefully make improvements to your marketing as seen fit.
What’s The Biggest Challenges Of Multichannel Marketing?
With any marketing strategy you use or launch, there’s going to be challenges you’ll need to address.
- Strategy Versus Marketing: A lot of companies make the mistake of thinking multichannel marketing includes strategy built-in and that’s just not case. While it’s easy to feel like adding more channels to your marketing will increase your sales, it may not turn out that way. There has to be strategy behind your marketing. Period. Adding a new channel or two is simple not enough.
- More Customer/Consumer Touchpoints: When you start adding multichannels to your marketing, you increase the touchpoints you’re having with prospects and current customers. While more touchpoints are great, it adds more complexity to your marketing strategies that you’re going to need to account for. Furthermore, you likely have automations behind your marketing that allow you to build relationships with prospects. Each part of these processes have to be thought out prior to implementation. These systems can be complex but very effective when built right.
- More Time And More Resources: Implementing a multichannel marketing strategy is going to force you to spend more time and resources. You need to go ahead and think about the new things you’re going to need to ensure your success. You may need new tools, software, people, more hours of commitment.
How You Can Create The Right Multichannel Marketing Strategy
As we said a few times in this article, you need to the right multichannel marketing strategy. In order to do so, you need to be aware of this and plan accordingly.
- Know Your Buyer: Before you create any multichannel marketing campaigns, you need to make sure you understand your customers.
- Ready Your Marketing Departments: If you’re going to be implementing a new multichannel marketing campaign, your marketing department needs to be prepared.
- Be Data Ready: The data and analytics you’re collected is vital to optimizing your multichannel marketing. Make sure you’re tracking the right data, make sure you have tracking enabled.
- Adjust Accordingly: When you launch new multichannel marketing campaigns, you need to pay close attention to performance. You need to know when to keep pressing and when to shut campaigns down.
- Set The Right Goals: What are your most important goals? For most of you, this is going to be sales and rightfully so. However, there’s other goals you may be trying to accomplish. Make sure your whole team is aware of these goals.
Test, Analyze And Adjust
When you’re launching marketing campaigns on a new channel, there’s always risk and reward. There’s also a lot of unknowns. For all online sellers, you need the right tools and software to properly test, analyze and adjust your marketing as needed. Despite what experts say, rarely is a marketing campaign launched and “left be.” Rather, campaigns are launched, results come in and based on those data points, adjustments can be made as needed.
For ecommerce sellers, order management is vital to understand how your sales channels are performing. Here at Thill, we help you manage your inventory with a powerful OMS suite that’s unmatched, not to mention the high level of customer service we give our ecommerce business owners.
On top of order management software, Thill’s software seamlessly integrates with popular ecommerce shopping carts, such as
- Amazon Ecommerce
- Ebay Ecommerce
- Magento Ecommerce
- Shopify Ecommerce
- WooCommerce Ecommerce
- KickStarter
Your marketing campaigns are vital to growing your business. If you know how to collect your data and act upon the results to optimize your campaigns, it’ll give you the ability to continue improving all of your multichannel marketing campaigns.
