Your Guide To Using Multichannel Marketing Tools

There are tons of ways to communicate with those around you — and the same goes for your marketing. Within each industry and market, there are large groups of target audiences that may be shopping for a particular product or service, but how can brands effectively engage with these people? And how can companies meet their audiences where they already are?

The answer lies in multichannel marketing.

People are exposed to hundreds or thousands of different ads every single day. That’s a really swamped marketplace! But, what if your brand communicated to your target audience in ways that actually got their attention? Cultivate better relationships with customers and create meaningful connections that lead to brand loyalty by using a handful of marketing channels. 

On top of building trust with your customers, multichannel marketing can also boost brand recognition. Think about it: We often need to hear or see something multiple times before that information or message sticks in our minds. That’s why it’s vital to interact with people using several marketing methods to help them truly remember your company. 

Let’s do a deep dive into the world of multichannel marketing to assess what advertising channels you need in your tool belt and sift through how to best manage them.

What is Multichannel Marketing?

Multichannel marketing is the act of interacting with customers or clients using a combination of both indirect and direct communication channels — websites, direct mail, social media, email, retail stores, ect. — and allowing people to respond using their desired channel. Ultimately, it’s all about choice. You give your target audience easily accessible ways to engage with you and they decide whether to take the bait. 

Customers are everywhere, and they have more say in how the buying process works than in the past. They have the freedom to purchase where and how they want — either online or in person — with more variety of product offerings and options than ever before. Make your brand the easy choice by giving people options on how to interact with your team, both with traditional marketing and digital marketing approaches.  

Traditional marketing: Company brochures or catalogs, cold calls, direct mailing campaigns and other offline approaches are considered traditional marketing. Although they’re not the latest and greatest methods of advertising, they do add value to your marketing efforts with their tried and tested results — depending on who your target audience is. Digital marketing: All other forms of advertising that involve the internet or some form of online communication are considered digital marketing. This includes content marketing, social media marketing, inbound marketing and email marketing, among others. 

Even though traditional and digital marketing use different platforms, they can work together to highlight a specific call to action. For example, you might advertise a promo code for 25% off a product on a blog, email, social post and in-store sign. The goal is to get your target audience to make a purchase, but you’re interacting with them using separate but consistent marketing channels. 

In order to keep up with customers and create an intentional advertising strategy, it’s handy to understand the three approaches to marketing: multichannel, cross-channel and omnichannel. All are attempting to turn people into loyal customers, but each reaches the audience a bit differently. 

Now that we understand the multichannel marketing approach, let’s compare it to alternative advertising types.

Cross-channel Marketing

While multichannel marketing focuses on moving a user from point A to point B by sending a consistent message through individual and disconnected channels, cross-channel marketing gives customers a cohesive experience with channels that complement one another across different stages of the customer journey. Instead of using channels to say the same message over all marketing platforms, cross-channel marketing looks like a shopper receiving an abandoned cart email to remind them to check out and complete a post-purchase satisfaction survey, text messages nudging them to leave a review and coupons mailed directly to the user’s home to encourage another trip to the shop. 

Omnichannel Marketing

Cross-channel helps customers through their buying journey, and omnichannel marketing engages with customers by providing different types of content through connected channels. Think of omnichannel marketing as a holistic approach to interacting with customers. For example, a person might read a blog that announces a new product, an email could contain a promo code and Instagram could show that product in action. 

There are thousands of ways to create a positive experience for your target audience. By focusing on multichannel marketing, your brand can communicate cohesively — no matter how the user chooses to interact with your company. But, how can you manage your marketing efforts without losing your head? Learn what marketing tools may help you balance multichannel communication. 

Use Multichannel Marketing Tools to Boost Business

You may have tons of amazing marketing ideas for multiple channels that you want to get started on right now. The problem is, it can be difficult to effectively create and manage several marketing channels with just one person or a small team working on it. But have no fear: Multichannel marketing tools are here! 

Multichannel digital marketing tools can support your campaigns across various channels, connecting inbound and outbound, digital and non-digital campaign insights within a single platform.

You may be thinking, “How on earth do you decide which marketing tools to implement when there are a gazillion options?” And we hear you. Though we can’t tell you exactly which marketing tools will perfectly work for your brand, we can give you some great suggestions to get started:

Email Marketing Tools

Although it’s been around since the 1970s, email is still an effective marketing tool to distribute content to customers. But to ensure your online messaging lands in the right hands (or inbox), you need a distribution channel for demand generation. Some of the top email marketing tools include:

MailChimp

Mailchimp is a popular email automation service that offers a wide range of plans for small businesses, huge enterprises and every company in between. It gives users the freedom to add features like email tracking, signup forms, spam filter diagnostics, auto-responders, A/B testing and email marketing automation. 

Pardot

This email marketing tool is tailored for B2B companies, specifically. Pardot offers users several features, including template builders, email automation, email personalization and A/B testing and tracking — and the platform works well for more complex B2B sales processes. 

Organic Search and SEO Tools

Your website’s ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs) can make or break your site’s reach. Most people won’t scroll past Page 1, meaning it’s vital your site is one of the first options they see. These organic search and SEO tools may shoot you up the search ladder:

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is ripe with insights into your website’s performance, traffic, engagement, navigation, conversion rates and ROI, among other data points. With the information from Google Analytics, you can assess what factors may need to be changed or rewritten to better reach your target audience. 

Sumo

Sumo helps users grow traffic and conversions with a suite of online marketing tools including list building, on-site analytics, social sharing, traffic boosting, communication and e-commerce capabilities. 

Social Media Marketing Tools

Social media has only grown in popularity as it’s become a critical part of multichannel marketing strategies for businesses all over the world. Make your social posts more consistent and effective with these helpful systems:

Buffer

Buffer is available for both mobile and desktop, and is designed to streamline your social media management and publishing processes. It provides features for optimizing engagement, tracking analytics and collaboration for social teams. 

BuzzSumo

This social media tool can help you discover and analyze the top-performing content and influencers in your market or industry. BuzzSumo can also assist with content creation based on trending topics and the most-followed people. 

PPC Marketing Tools

PPC has the power to spread brand awareness and sell products quickly if done with the marketing devices in tow. Here are some useful systems to partner with:

WordTracker 

Keyword research is a breeze with WordTracker, a platform that presents useful data for PPC campaigns like search volume, PPC competition, CPC and related queries to help you find new key phrases for your market. 

Wordstream

Wordstream offers a complete PPC management solution with a wide range of online marketing tools that allow people to create, manage and track PPC and social media campaigns, all in one place. It also works well with several platforms like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc. 

To decide what multichannel marketing tools to go for, first, create a multichannel marketing strategy that can guide you down the right path.

What To Include in Your Multichannel Marketing Strategy

A multichannel marketing strategy is a blueprint that shows how different channels work together to accomplish your brand’s goals. Here are the main components of your marketing strategy for several platforms and advertising types:

Brand reach: Discover what your brand’s most successful marketing channels are. The main goal of multichannel marketing is to increase brand awareness and reach, so sending content through your most successful channels can help accomplish this. Brand message: What do you want to communicate to your target audience, and what will resonate with that group of people the most? Consistency: Because you’ll be creating cohesive content for various channels, one of the most important parts of your strategy is ensuring you’re sharing consistent information in your brand’s tone and voice. Channel-specific rules: Although you’re delivering a consistent message, you’ll want to pay attention to the effective uses of each channel. Some platforms are more visual while others rely on text or video, meaning you must create an individual strategy for each marketing type for the best possible impact. Experience: Customers should be able to interact with your brand anytime, anywhere and receive the same positive customer experience. While each channel looks different, a user should go to your website, Facebook or brick-and-mortar store and hear the same message and see consistent design throughout. 

With a clear multichannel marketing strategy in your back pocket and marketing tools to boot, you should have no issues reaching your target audience and growing your business. 

Benefits of Strong Multichannel Marketing

In the crowded, ever-spinning marketing world, it may be costly to avoid multichannel marketing. Your target audiences spend time on several channels every single day — and you may miss them without strong marketing efforts.

If you’re waiting to begin implementing multichannel marketing, consider this your pistol shot on the starting line. These benefits are waiting:

Extend Your Reach

As we’ve already mentioned, people are all over the place when it comes to the digital space. That means you can expand who you interact with by widening the ways in which you communicate. When you only use one marketing channel and your customers move to a new preferred communication method, you may lose them — even if you post the highest quality content or top sales promotions. Figure out where your desired audience spends their time, and send your content through that platform. 

Improve Customer Trust

If your customers have been burned by misleading content or inconsistent messaging in the past, rebuild  trust in your company by offering them the exact same benefits and experience however they choose to interact with your brand. This can strengthen brand loyalty and make it more likely that they will continue to pick you over the competition. 

Increase Engagement

Generally, if you open extra roads to your brand, more people will reach out to you. Obviously, you must use the marketing channels that are most effective with your specific audience to gain customers and increase engagement. But if you open up previously closed routes — social media or PPC, perhaps — then you may find a whole new group of readily available customers just waiting to convert. 

Save Money

We realize that saving money may not seem like a potential outcome for using more marketing platforms, but multichannel marketing has the potential to increase your return on investment a bit faster than with more limited marketing channels. You can also implement multiple marketing channels more affordably by employing tools that can streamline and cut back on costs in the long run. 

Target More Efficiently

With the various channels and advertising types at your disposal, you can better target more specific customers from different demographics and behaviors. With a solid multichannel marketing strategy built, you can look at each group of customer personas and determine the best approach to reach them. Save yourself the time and energy it takes to track down your target audience, and simply use your data to go directly where your customers are already spending their time. 

Whether you’re a large or small company, multichannel marketing can become your best friend when it comes to interacting with customers across multiple platforms. Get started by choosing the right multichannel tools that can bring your marketing full circle — from content creation to customer purchase.