If you want to create a more personalized and comprehensive customer experience (probably without reaching creepy levels of personalization), a single-channel approach is not going to help you to get there. Today, marketers must determine the platforms which their target audience is using to achieve their goals. Cross-channel marketing is one of the most effective ways to allow consumers to interact with your brand. The term ‘Cross-Channel’ is what marketers are using to define the campaigns they are running across many platforms. The point is to make your marketing efforts successful by joining different channels together towards a common goal.
Here are a few key principles mentioned to help you understand the fundamentals of developing cross-channel marketing strategies.
Set Marketing Objective
The importance of setting a marketing objective is usually underestimated. It sounds obvious that marketers will set an objective before developing a cross-channel digital marketing strategy. However, what they don’t understand is that they need to translate their business objectives into marketing objectives through KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
You can develop various digital KPIs to analyze the way digital channels are going to impact your marketing objectives. These objectives will give you a clear framework to help you communicate your strategy and make proper plans that can impact wider business objectives in the long run.
Moreover, you can notice that certain sections or channels are highly responsive to a particular marketing campaign by analyzing their performance level through KPIs. This way, you will also be able to describe your marketing strategy to the stakeholders of your business. It will help them understand the overall performance of the marketing strategy.
Once you have defined your marketing objectives, you will be able to determine the effect of marketing on your business objectives through KPIs. However, you must know that each channel has its strengths and weaknesses when it comes to developing KPIs. You can analyze the performance of a variety of channels through different indicators, however, you should keep in mind that each channel has a clearly defined role within your marketing strategy.
Have Insights
Marketers usually claim that they have founded the strategies based on their insights. However, that might not always be the case. You can see a lot of cross-channel digital marketing strategies that are merely based on assumptions. It is not prohibited to make assumptions, however, it is better to gather the data first and test it to base the final decision on analytics, not on gut feelings. For instance, you can unify the data of a customer by tracking URLs, emails to which he responds, blog posts he has been engaged with, and his browsing history with tools such as Google Analytics.
Moreover, you can develop a habit of questioning yourself about the insights you have to support your decision. For instance, if you develop a particular strategy, you must have a look around to see what your competitors are doing. You should have other different sources that can support your insights about a marketing strategy.
It is a common practice of humans to be comfortable with what they have been doing in the past for years. As a result, a lot of marketers end up practicing outdated methods for cross-channel digital marketing. However, if you use high-quality insights that are proven and tested, you won’t fall for old traditional ways of digital marketing.
For instance, the Google display network is one of the most renowned and latest digital marketing channels that has a reach over 90% of the internet users all over the world. The display ads are shown on multiple websites, videos, articles, or social media forums to attract the audience. So, when you decide to choose the Google display ad strategy for digital marketing across multiple channels, you should know why you are using a certain format, image, or text.
Every minor detail you use in the display ad should also be according to the insight you have regarding the targeted audience. You should find out what they are thinking, why they are behaving a certain way, and how they feel about a certain product or service. You must also track the metrics by finding out which channel brings you the most conversions when you place Google Display Ads on them. Most importantly, you don’t have to choose those ads which other marketers are using, instead, you should use insights to make the best decision possible.
Make Hypothesis
Assumptions can make or break your experience of creating a cross-channel digital marketing strategy. No matter how hard you try to avoid it in the process, you will end up making assumptions about what is going to work for you. This is where hypothesis plays a key role as it helps in identifying whether the assumptions you are making are right or wrong.
You must know how to base your hypothesis on insights that are driven by KPIs, to make sure that they are aligned with your marketing objectives. So, every hypothesis should have a proper testing methodology that is clearly defined to validate your strategy. This way, the results you get in the end will help you provide more insights for the next step of this cycle.
In the digital marketing world, every customer will choose a different channel. So, it can be challenging for you to create a cross-channel digital marketing strategy to reach a wider audience (especially in the FLoCs era). However, if you incorporate the above-mentioned three major key principles into your digital marketing strategy, you will be able to deliver the desired results in a short span. Also, if you repeat this cycle a few times, all of your digital marketing efforts might get paid off even more quickly.
