If you want an increased ROI, this article is for you! What is Multi-Channel Marketing?

As we enter the digital age where everyone uses the internet as a part of their daily lives, the channels for buying and selling products online have become so diverse that it is almost impossible to choose between them. This is why each brand needs to analyse the appropriate platform for their business needs. Brands also need to know the location of the target audience and how to promote it to get effective results and achieve the best value for their money. 

In this article, we will talk about another strategy that always comes side–by–side, this is “Multi-Channel Marketing”. This strategy is also more frequently used in today’s businesses because it can reach a wider target group. It also helps add more options for customers.

What is Multi-Channel Marketing?

“Good products and services but the brand is not yet well known.”

“I want to create content that promotes the brand, but I don’t know what channel I should choose.”

Before reaching the point of success, I believe that many businesses must have experienced problems as mentioned above.  There are many channels to choose from in the present day. This makes marketing more difficult and more competitive than ever before. No matter how modern marketing tools have become, making the results effective is still a challenge. Therefore, multi-channel marketing strategies are widely used across different businesses. 

Multi-channel marketing is marketing that presents brand products and services through more than one channel. It can either be through making content on social media platforms, creating campaigns with customers via email, generating ads, creating organic content, or starting an online event. Multi-channel marketing aims to increase the opportunity to reach a wider audience, including expanding existing marketing channels to generate more income. In addition to being an online marketing strategy on various channels, multi-channel marketing can also integrate offline marketing to support different consumption lifestyles for products and services of customers. 

The statistics from the website Passive Secrets states that since the outbreak of COVID-19, businesses have turned to multi-channel marketing. It is increasingly being used to give consumers greater access to brand campaigns and advertisements. 77% of businesses have more than seven marketing channels and 63% having three or more marketing channels.

What is the difference between Omni Channel and Multi-Channel Marketing?

If you ask what marketing channels are, you will probably get various answers. But there are two types of strategies in marketing channels that are widely known among marketers; omni-channel and multi-channel marketing. 

As mentioned in the omni-channel article, omni channel is a marketing tool through merging or consolidating all customer touchpoints into one place whether it is email, social media, websites, phone calls, or any form of chat to prevent errors and make buying and selling easier and quicker. While multi-channel marketing is marketing across multiple channels, aiming to support the contact of customers from different channels in order to reach a wider range of customers to generate more income. 

Nowadays, we notice that many businesses tend to use a multi-channel strategy more than ever before as modern and convenient new channels are emerging every day. Consumers exist across multiple platforms. Many stores have developed and increased communication channels to support customers on channels that are more convenient for them to use. 

However, for brands wanting to expand their businesses, multi-channel may not be an option that meets their requirements. When our business gets bigger, we have to handle more customers each day. And separating the platforms to serve each customer from multiple channels may result in many problems, as our examples illustrate:

•  If we have employees who communicate with customers or many admins, how will each admin know if the issue of a customer has been solved or not? How will the admin know the progress of the conversation? There may also be incidents of replying to chats or competing to answer, which will cause confusion, and customers will not be impressed. 
• On the other hand, If we have few employees or we communicate by ourselves, it may cause a delay in responding to customers.
• Regarding collecting customer information, if it’s a customer who has contacted us before, we have to ask for all the information again. This could make customers feel dissatisfied. We also have to do redundant work.

Incidentally, the working model of omni channel is the opposite of multi-channel marketing, which is to consolidate everything into one channel. The aim is to reduce the problem of confusion among the store’s admins by making it clear that the status of each customer is in process. This is so you don’t have to ask customers repeatedly, leading to easier and faster management. However, omni-channel may not reach the target audience as widely as multi-channel. If you want to penetrate the target group from a variety of channels and focus on making a lot of profit, omni channel marketing may not be your best solution. 

What are the advantages of multi-channel marketing?

• Increase brand awareness in a wider range
• Help increase revenue for the business
• Help create a satisfactory experience for customers because customers can access the brand from more channels, which make buying and selling much easier
• Help expand the customer base
• Help generate more return on investment or ROI.

How to does multi-channel marketing gain a high ROI?

Set clear goals

No matter the type of business, the first priority of marketing is to set a clear goal.  How do we want to achieve results from the campaign? Answering this question will help you to see a clear action plan. It can also measure results and determine if the goals we set can be reached.

 Then we can use the data to further analyse how effective this campaign is, and if it meets the needs of customers. We can also see if it should be improved or further developed. 

Understand your target audience

One thing marketers need to know before advertising is to make advertisements for consumers to see. However, not everyone who sees the ad will become our customer. So we need to find our own target audience and understand those groups. We do this by analysing data through the use of marketing tools that supply information about the problems that customers are facing. We should also analyse the channels used by the target audience, collect reviews or feedback from customers, and analyse demographic information such as age, occupation, gender, and place of residence. By gathering this information, we can market to them according to the data and provide what they want the most.

Choose a channel that increases your chances of reaching your target audience

Before we spend our budget and time on any marketing channel, we have to choose the right channel that responds to the campaign. We will use this channel, as well as the target groups first. Even if we use more than one channel, every channel has to be analysed to find the ones with the best chances of reaching our target audience. Otherwise, investing in many of our channels would not be beneficial. 

Test customer preferences with A/B Testing

The next thing you should do is A/B Testing on each content after you choose the right channel. This is to see if the content format or type of ads will provide the best results. This can be done through e-mail, for example, if we want to send promotions or write updated content for customers to see which content creation results are better. We can then create different content with these factors:

• Email subject and content
• Article length
• Design, layout, color themes used
• Call-to-action that invites users to click at the end of the content.

Always measure marketing results

In marketing, results must always be measured. It can be both in the short-term and long–term to assess how effective the campaign is in line with the goals set at the beginning of the campaign. It helps us to measure the direction of the business. It also helps us decide whether the channel we are using will still receive positive feedback and make a profit in the future, or should it be changed to a new channels to reach the target audience better.

Conclusion

Therefore, to reach a wider target group, multi-channel marketing is another interesting strategy. Presently, businesses tend to sell their products or services across more than one channel. As more consumers turn to online shopping, they are often scattered across multiple channels. So for us to make a lot of profit, it is necessary to ensure diversity across the channels as well. 

To become a leader in a highly competitive business world, sometimes doing it alone is not enough. If you need help from marketing experts, Primal Digital Agency will be more than happy to offer our full range of services. We are ready to deliver a marketing plan designed specifically for the customer’s business. We guarantee that we can raise your ROI!