Effective cross-channel marketing to grow your audience

A unified and cohesive marketing campaign designed to grow your audience is rooted in consistent messaging and branding across marketing channels. If you’re looking to grow your audience and enhance your brand awareness, then effective cross-channel marketing is one of the keys to your success. To help you get started, we’re going over the importance of effective cross-channel marketing to grow your audience.

What is Cross-Channel Marketing?

Cross-channel marketing is a unified and cohesive marketing strategy designed to enhance the customer journey across touchpoints or marketing channels with consistent messaging and branding. An effective cross-channel marketing strategy utilizes multiple marketing channels or customer touchpoints while maintaining a consistent message, advertisement, or brand voice across those channels. This not only creates a consistent tone in your marketing campaigns but also helps move customers along the buying journey with ease.

Effective cross-channel marketing examples involve social media ads across multiple outlets such as Facebook and Instagram combined with radio or television ads. Successful cross-channel marketing campaigns promote similar messages while maintaining consistent branding across consumer touchpoints.

What is the Difference Between Multi-Channel and Cross-Channel Marketing?

The difference between multi-channel and cross-channel marketing lies in the consistent messaging to your customers and the cohesiveness of your marketing campaigns across channels. Multi-channel marketing involves utilizing various marketing outlets to reach your customers or buyers. In contrast, cross-channel marketing harnesses the power of a unified message and consistent branding across these channels. Cross-channel marketing creates a personalized, simplified and measurable customer journey.
Utilizing a single or multi-channel marketing campaign without unified goals, messages, or branding means you could be missing out on a large segment of your target market or audience. Perhaps the biggest difference between multi-channel marketing and cross-channel marketing campaigns is the underlying organized strategy, or lack thereof, behind each marketing method.

How Do You Create a Cross-Channel Marketing Strategy?

You create a cross-channel marketing strategy by first unifying your marketing efforts across channels, outlets, or touchpoints. Another critical aspect is implementing a marketing attribution model to track and monitor the success of your campaigns. To create a cross-channel marketing strategy, take the following steps:  

• Analyze the data: Cross-channel marketing is reliant on marketing data and analytics to drive decision-making and simplify cross-channel campaign management. If your business does not already harness the power of marketing data or marketing attribution software to help guide and drive the decision-making process, then this is the first place to start.
• Develop buyer or customer personas: One of the staples of an effective cross-channel marketing strategy is understanding your customers or audience and common pain points. You will need to examine customer behaviors when interacting with your brand or competitor's brands and the ways you can make their buying journey easier or more unified. This usually starts with harnessing your marketing data to uncover commonalities and identify unique segments within your target market or customer base. 
• Utilize marketing technology: An impactful cross-channel marketing strategy is steeped in accurate and comprehensive marketing data collection practices, which oftentimes starts with choosing the right marketing technology designed to automate the data collection and data reporting processes. From there, you will want to utilize marketing techniques such as email marketing software solutions designed to optimize campaigns and personalize consumer messages.    
• Optimize ads and create a unified approach: You will need to optimize your cross-channel marketing campaigns and create a unified, targeted approach to your campaigns. This process often involves cross-channel attribution to collect data and find out what is and is not working for your cross-channel marketing campaigns before implementing your strategy accordingly.   

What Are The 5 Marketing Channels?

The 5 marketing channels are as follows: 

1. Website and SEO: Search engine marketing (SEM) harnesses the power of organic search and search results. This drives internet traffic to a specific website or webpage using keywords and other technical on-page techniques to enhance search engine visibility and discovery. 
2. Over 65% of all online interactions begin with users conducting basic search queries where questions or keywords are entered into a search engine, prompting search results that display the most accurate and related web pages. A great example of SEO is blogging, which many brands use as an opportunity to publish helpful customer resources such as case studies, how-to articles, product spotlights, and buying guides. 
3. Social Media: Social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram offer marketers a way to engage with large or small segments of their customer base and further enhance brand image and consumer awareness.
4. Most social media platforms offer website integrations that make it easy for digital marketers to share information with social media followers without needing to jump between marketing channels. Social posts are designed to interact with users, grow your audience, help customers solve problems, or create awareness about a new product or service your brand offers. 
5. Referrals, Affiliates, and Word-of-Mouth: These marketing channels are steeped in the principle that discovering and learning more about a company’s products and services does not always need to be facilitated by pushy salespeople or blatant and explicit advertising campaigns. This marketing channel relies on past and present users, buyers, or customers to become brand stewards and market your products or services on your behalf. 
6. Referral marketing offers a nuanced approach to cross-channel marketing and is a form of user-generated content. User-generated content comes from sources such as social media influencers, affiliate marketers, and product reviewers. Referral, affiliate, or word-of-mouth marketing helps drive brand awareness and establish your brand’s credibility or trustworthiness with consumers for little to no advertising cost beyond the time your team has invested. Today, this marketing channel typically involves using written online testimonials, social media posts, or user-submitted video demonstrations that increase consumer awareness of your products or services and solidifies your trustworthiness or credibility.
7. Video: This marketing channel utilizes the power of video messaging to drive conversions, boost customer engagement, and heighten overall brand awareness. What used to be restricted to one outlet, television, and video campaigns are now widely used by cross-channel marketers on online platforms and digital marketing channels of all types including social media and websites. 
8. New technology allows cross-channel marketers to create interactive video campaigns where viewers can follow links to specific products or services across company websites or web pages, driving quality leads and sales conversions in the process.   
9. Email: This marketing channel replaced traditional “snail mail” marketing channels and campaigns as the preferred method for direct advertising to customers or buyers. Email empowers cross-channel marketing campaigns by targeting specific consumer groups, allowing marketers to test variations of their messaging with A/B testing and providing comprehensive marketing stats and data such as open rates and call-to-action (CTA) effectiveness.  

How Do Marketing Channels Work Together?

Marketing channels work together by unifying your brand’s message across consumer touchpoints, making their path to conversion seamless, easy, and measurable. Many of the top brands are masters at creating cross-channel advertising campaigns that subtly move consumers closer to taking an intended action or converting them into buyers. A few cross-channel marketing examples to model your campaigns after include: 

• Starbucks: The coffee giant’s Frappuccino Happy Hour campaign offers digital marketers a perfect cross-channel marketing example to model their campaigns after. Using a combination of social media posts, SMS text messaging and the company’s in-app messaging and rewards system, Starbucks was able to successfully launch a new promotion and drive in-store sales during a competitive time of day for food and beverage brands.  
• The NFL: The National Football League (NFL) operates some of the most effective cross-channel advertising campaigns. Partnering with popular online fantasy football platforms, The NFL’s consistent online messaging and live television broadcasts are excellent cross-channel marketing examples to model your campaigns after. Although you may not have the power of a live, nationally syndicated weekly broadcast behind you, you can implement some of the same techniques using other live video broadcasting tools.       
• State Farm: Insurance giant State Farm offers simple yet effective cross-channel marketing examples to model your campaigns after in its “Jake from State Farm” television commercials. State Farm’s character “Jake” interacts with popular athletes and musicians and carries this persona over to social media and other online channels. State Farm created social media profiles to regularly post and engage with online audiences, empowering the company to grow its audience and establish brand awareness amongst younger customer segments who may not always consider insurance a top priority.

Measured Marketing Attribution Software Empowers Effective Cross-Channel Marketing Campaigns

The most effective cross-channel marketing campaigns harness the power of accurate data and analytics reporting to grow an audience and drive conversions. Measured offers marketing attribution software solutions designed to collect the most vital statistics and guide your cross-channel marketing strategy. 

Book a demo with Measured today and grow your audience using the power of marketing attribution data to fuel your cross-channel marketing campaigns.