Today, in the world of digital marketing, multiple channel marketing has become dramatically popular among the world’s top marketers. If you also want to know everything about multi-channel marketing, follow our article.

Multiple channel marketing refers to the practice of utilizing multiple marketing channels, such as online and offline platforms, to reach and engage with target audiences. This approach allows businesses to diversify their reach, increase brand visibility, and effectively communicate their message through various channels simultaneously.

All about multi-channel marketing: Multi-channel definition and its importance & benefits in marketing

All about multi-channel marketing: Multi-channel definition and its importance & benefits in marketing

Due to the growth of marketing science, as well as the development of analytical tools, marketing strategists have come to the conclusion that companies can’t boost significant improvements by advertising and marketing in the same advertising channel.

So if you focus on one aspect, you definitely can’t achieve more sales funnel or targeted branding.

Accordingly, various marketing professionals have thought about promoting their products or services and finding customers through multi-channel marketing strategies as well.

So, currently, getting acquainted with multi-channel marketing is essential for any marketer and seller.

Do you know what multi-channel marketing is?

What do you mean by multi-channel marketing?

Multi-channel means leveraging several different media channels to market products or services, interact with prospective customers, and spread marketing messages.

These channels that companies and organizations actively use to reach buyers to sell their goods or services to them are both direct and indirect.

Direct channels include physical stores, printed ads like catalogs, display ads such as billboards or posters, direct email, etc., as well as indirect channels, in which content is published via websites, mobile apps, or social media, also referred to as inbound marketing.

What do you mean by multi-channel marketing?

It should be noted that these channels are not limited to what was mentioned.

But it also involves other means of getting in touch with potential clients by multi-channel marketing such as text messages, podcasts, hot and cold emails, TV ads, mobile devices, visual advertising tools like trailers, webinars, social media, GPS platforms for customer tracking, SEO, etc.

It is important to remember that in multiple channel marketing, inbound and outbound marketing methods are combined in order to prospect.

In the simplest terms, multi-channel marketing is all about choice. What does this mean?

In the sense that marketers provide several different communication channels for their potential customers to choose from.

In single-channel marketing, there is only one way of communication, and if the audience does not have access to the desired channel, the way of communication is lost, and as a result, the popularity of your brand and product decreases.

This is while there is also nothing in multi-channel marketing.

In order for you to easily understand the concept of multi-channel marketing, we’ll give you an example:

Suppose that you have an online business and accordingly, you have a store website.

As such, you’ve developed both a website and a mobile app to access this online store. Your customers can choose any of these ways and buy products or services from your store depending on their choice and ease of access and facilities.

Why does multi-channel marketing matter?

Maybe this question comes to your mind, why is multi-channel marketing so important nowadays?

As much as multi-channel marketing is important among marketers because they need to be instantly present wherever their potential customers are likely to be.

If you need another reason to understand the importance of multi-channel marketing, consider that multi-channel marketing customers spend 3-4 times more time across channels than single-channel customers.

And as a result, this leads to directing them to the sales & prospecting funnel of the company or organization.

It is interesting to note that today, prospects have more control over the buying process than marketers and sales representatives.

So paying attention to the expansion of marketing channels, strategies, and plans about them is essential for business owners and professional marketers.

It is good to know that companies and organizations that have effective multichannel marketing always focus more on brand access, interaction, experience, and message than those that don’t use this marketing.

As a whole, the importance of multi-channel marketing can be summarized as follows:

In order to interact more with likely customers, every salesperson or professional marketer must be able to spread their message and content in the target market through various communication channels.

What are the benefits of multi-channel marketing?

What are the benefits of multi-channel marketing?

Some marketers and other stakeholders may want to know and realize the benefits of multi-channel marketing.

Here are a few long-term perks of this type of marketing.

1. Better management of results and sales funnel:

Using multiple communication platforms to reach your audience increases your chances of getting feedback from different customers about your overall performance.

This feedback gives companies or organizations a good idea of what their prospects want and what short-term or long-term strategies can be formulated based on that.

2. Higher revenue:

The more diverse platforms are used in an effort to reach potential customers and generate more leads, the more likely it is that prospects will be attracted to your goods or services and turn into your regular customers.

For example, if a company or organization promotes its brand through only one communication channel like television, attracting and engaging potential customers who rely on other sources or social media such as LinkedIn will be much more difficult and challenging.

Another surprising reason to use multi-channel marketing is that approximately 36% of customers search for products or services in one channel but purchase them through another channel or source.

Therefore, it is strongly recommended that you use several offline and online communication channels to promote your products to get better results in terms of marketing your brand.

3. Better understanding of clients:

Always remember that with customer feedback, it can be easier to figure out what they expect from a product or service and how to boost the brand.

To satisfy the needs of a specific group of buyers, it is vital to identify the channels and strategies that work well for them.

On top of that, you can take advantage of analytical tools such as Google Analytics or LinkedIn Analytics to get an insight into your target audience community.

4. More brand awareness

However, multi-channel marketing presents new ways for your potential customers to enhance brand visibility and reach.

Plus, multi-channel marketing helps increase your brand awareness among more diverse audiences and different demographics.

It is safe to say that this increased visibility and brand awareness will improve the growth of your business.

5. Wider audience

This is real but simple magic:

The more channels you use to promote your brand, the more customers you will engage.

What’s important is that multi-channel marketing not only attracts new customers but also helps to cultivate the loyalty of your regular customers to buy their favorite products.

6. Better understanding of social proof

Did you know that for modern online business owners, one of the most effective factors that help them gain valuable experiences related to their brand is social proof?

Multi-channel marketing allows prospects to learn about other people’s shopping experiences using digital marketing capabilities such as social media chatter or online reviews.

Based on the idea of social influence, buyers are more likely to buy products or services that have been praised and recommended by others.

Note: If you’ve ever purchased a product or service according to a review or endorsement by others, you too have been influenced by social proof in marketing campaigns.

7. Better email marketing outreach:

To do strong multi-channel marketing, you need one of the most efficient channels, or in other words, the most effective digital marketing strategies: Email marketing campaigns.

Sales email marketing is one of the best options for prospecting and better identifying the needs of your potential customers.

With the help of multi-channel marketing, you can synchronize the data and the search results obtained from email marketing.

In addition, you can start and run multiple cross-channel campaigns by combining data collected from individual methods.

8. More visibility:

When you become familiar with different marketing channels, it means you get to know more customers and brands.

As a matter of fact, investing in an effective channel can increase interest in your business through other channels.

For example, according to reliable statistics, promoting on LinkedIn can rank higher your brand in Google search results.

How to build a winning multiple channel strategy?

Today, the modern marketing environment has provided marketers and businesses with many advantages and excellent tools to create an effective multi-channel marketing strategy.

For example, in multi-channel marketing, in order to uncover your target audiences, as well as to have access to their contact information and to be able to meet customers wherever they are, you can take a look at their profiles on LinkedIn and other social networks.

Three important issues in multi-channel marketing:

Additionally, in order for you to be able to launch a high-performing multi-channel marketing strategy, you need to know the following three basic issues:

1. Integrated communication campaigns:

Integrated communication campaigns

Since multi-channel marketing depends on consumers’ choice of their desired channel, in order to make it easy for customers to buy, you must prioritize their favorite channels.

Furthermore, this requires an integrated set of pain points for your prospects to move them down the sales funnel.

Therefore, it is important for marketers to organize integrated campaigns across both digital and physical sources in order to create a profitable business experience.

Remember that multi-channel marketing is created by identifying the strengths and weaknesses of each channel.

However, understanding & recognizing a channel and engaging with customers at the best time is the key to establishing a dynamic, profitable, and sustainable relationship with target audiences.

It is interesting to know that based on studies conducted in this field of marketing, over 90% of professional marketers use more than three or four channels in marketing campaigns for a seamless connection.

2. Multichannel marketing plan

Multichannel marketing plan

Having a good plan for multi-channel marketing leads to attracting more customers for the defined categories of your products or services.

Do you know what a multi-channel marketing plan is?

A multi-channel marketing plan is actually a marketing communication plan.

Keep in mind that the focus of the multi-channel marketing plan is on the selection of inbound marketing techniques, content types, and prospecting channels.

When planning multi-channel marketing, regarding the communication between the buyer and seller during the customer journey, the integration of multi-channel online and offline activities should be given sufficient attention.

In general, the need for a multi-channel plan is always crucial for the customer lifecycle.

Multichannel marketing plan

Note: A customer life cycle consists of the following steps: Advocacy, Brand awareness, Consideration, Purchase, and Retention

That being said, integration is what makes a multi-channel marketing communications plan necessary.

For example, this issue can be decisive and helpful in the following situations:

  • As an annual communication plan for a small-to-medium sized business (SMB) or a small-to-medium sized enterprise (SME)
  • As an annual communication plan for a larger business market or audience
  • As a long-term customer engagement plan for a market or target audience

3. Multi-channel marketing challenges

Multi-channel marketing challenges

Keep in mind that implementing a multi-channel marketing strategy is not always hassle-free and there are many challenges associated with running a multi-channel marketing strategy.

Which channels work best for your business? Where does your core audience spend most of their time? What are the popular channels of your target audience?

These are important questions and challenges that may arise in your mind before starting a multi-channel marketing campaign.

Having access to the above information should greatly influence your multi-channel marketing approach.

Challenge 1#: How to understand the target audience?

An important and vital issue in multi-channel marketing is that marketers must understand their audience.

Marketers can’t expect their customers to change their behavior and behave as they wish.

Instead, what is significant for marketers is that they must pay attention to consumer preferences so that they can act at the right time and place across all channels to reach their target prospects.

Challenge 2#: How to optimize the channels?

It is very difficult to know which channels and campaigns reach a certain group of people or which platform helps in driving sales revenue.

It is difficult to know which targeted response will give marketers the best results.

In fact, optimizing the media you use in multi-channel marketing gives you a good, accurate idea of how your channels are performing and what kind of results you’re getting from them.

In general, these are the three types of information that will help you improve certain aspects of your marketing campaign.

Challenge 3#: How to have targeted and correct messaging?

Given the abundance of channels and choices facing your potential customers, it is not enough to simply deliver the right message to your target audience. Rather, your messages should be attractive & interactive, as well as make your prospects encourage you to respond and take appropriate action.

To put it simply, these messages should be written in such a way that they communicate with your customers and you can enter into a constructive conversation with them through these messages.

For example, since LinkedIn is the largest niche-focused social network in the world, you can engage with your LinkedIn connections such as 2nd and 3rd-degree connections using LinkedIn sales or thank-you message templates.

Basic steps to create multi-channel marketing:

So how to create a proper and great multichannel marketing strategy?

Now, if you want to know how to do that, you should follow these six steps:

Step 1:

Before running any campaign in any type of marketing, you need to decide which group of your audience you want to target with your campaign. (Identifying the target audience)

Step 2:

After you’ve targeted your ideal customers, it’s time to choose the right channels that your target audience prefers. (Select a channel)

Step 3:

After you have chosen effective and appropriate channels, you should now prioritize them based on your customers’ choices. (Prioritize channels)

Step 4:

To ensure that your strategy provides a great user experience, create a great messaging or sales email template. (Use prospecting template)

Step 5:

Use appropriate analytics tools to track prospects’ reactions and explore their interests and preferences. (Use analytics tools)

Bonus tip: Analytics tools help marketers a lot to track different metrics of their target customers on different social media and report success.

For example, you can use the LinkedIn analytics gadget to analyze your prospects’ LinkedIn pages.

It’s worth mentioning that LinkedIn allows you to save their LinkedIn profiles as PDFs.

The LinkedIn analytics tool gives you the necessary insight to create an effective strategy and increase interactions so that you can both optimize your LinkedIn profile and receive feedback from your target audience.

Step 6:

Use a new retargeting strategy to re-engage your customers who have bounced off in the middle of your marketing campaign. (Use a retargeting strategy)

Omni channel vs multi-channel

Omni channel vs multi-channel

If you’ve already heard of omnichannel marketing, you might ask how this type of marketing differs from multi-channel marketing.

If you want to understand the difference between them well, we must first know what omnichannel marketing is.

What is omnichannel marketing?

“Omnichannel” is a term in digital marketing trends that has attracted a lot of attention from marketers worldwide in 2019.

Omnichannel marketing is a strategy that provides a fully integrated customer experience from the first point of contact to the last.

In other words, this means that no matter what channel a customer uses to communicate with a brand, that channel will deliver a relevant and customized message to that customer.

Omnichannel is especially important for businesses that deal with potential consumers.

That’s why 70% of prospects utilize three or more channels for purchasing research.

Hence, an omnichannel strategy is the best way for a company to create a unique customer experience for customers.

What are the differences between omnichannel marketing and multichannel marketing?

What are the differences between omnichannel marketing and multichannel marketing?

1. In multichannel marketing, the focus is on the brand, while in omnichannel marketing, the customer is at the center of the strategy.

2. Multichannel marketing emphasizes customer engagement, while omnichannel marketing focuses on improving the customer experience.

3. The goal of multichannel marketing is to expand the number of available channels, but omnichannel marketing aims to establish links between existing channels.

4. Multichannel marketing focuses on quantity, while omnichannel emphasizes quality.

5. Another main difference between these two types of marketing is that multichannel marketing includes a limited set of content channels, but omnichannel marketing includes all channels.

Related Questions & Answers

Multi channel digital marketing

Multi-channel digital marketing refers to the practice of utilizing multiple online channels to reach and engage with target audiences. It involves leveraging various digital platforms and tactics to create a cohesive and integrated marketing strategy. Here’s a simple explanation of multi-channel digital marketing in two paragraphs:

  1. Diversified Online Presence: Multi-channel digital marketing recognizes the importance of having a diverse online presence to maximize reach and engagement. It involves utilizing multiple channels such as social media, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, display advertising, and more. By utilizing different channels, businesses can connect with their target audience through various touchpoints, increasing the chances of reaching potential customers at different stages of their buyer’s journey.
  2. Consistent Brand Messaging: One key aspect of multi-channel digital marketing is maintaining consistent brand messaging across all channels. It’s crucial to ensure that the brand’s value proposition, tone, and messaging are consistent across different platforms. This helps in building brand recognition and reinforcing brand identity. Additionally, integrating different channels and aligning messaging ensures a seamless user experience, allowing customers to interact with the brand in a cohesive way, regardless of the channel they choose to engage with.

Overall, multi-channel digital marketing recognizes the importance of leveraging various online channels to effectively connect with target audiences, increase brand visibility, and drive business growth. By diversifying the marketing efforts and maintaining consistent messaging, businesses can optimize their online presence and maximize their chances of engaging with customers in meaningful ways.

Conclusion

You must have learned everything you need to know about the necessity, benefits, and creation of a successful multiple channel marketing strategy in this article.

In a nutshell, multiple channel marketing happens when you use different channels such as social media, SEO, devices, and more to interact with your potential and current customers, as well as attract them to your brand.

So, according to this definition, whatever channel your customers prefer to be there, you should be there.

As a whole, any brand that wants to achieve success and increase its profit as much as possible must take advantage of multi-channel marketing. Accordingly, our advice is to not let new or multiple marketing channels stop you from reaching your goal.

FAQs

What is multiple-channel marketing?

Multi-channel marketing is defined by many marketing professionals as communicating and marketing to prospect and attract potential customers through direct and indirect communication channels both online and offline.

What is an example of multi-channel marketing?

An excellent example of multi-channel marketing is Macy’s in the USA, which was able to significantly increase its sales by using different marketing channels such as SEO, social media: Facebook and Instagram, and physical stores. The managers of this company realized that clients get to know the company through Google and social media, then visit the stores and buy in person.

What is multi-channel marketing and its benefits?

The advantages of multi-channel marketing include: Widely reaching target audiences, increasing customer interaction with brands and products, attracting customers and turning them into buyers, expanding marketing and sales campaigns, and accessing consumers’ interests.

Categorized in: