How To Craft A Multi-Channel Marketing Strategy That Works
Learn all about the industry’s best practices, examples, and techniques to execute your multi-channel marketing strategy correctly.
Posted 2 months ago
Written by
Mackenzie TaylorPosted 2 months ago
73% of customers shop online using multiple channels. Can you reach yours wherever they are? If not, we’ll guide you on creating a winning multi-channel marketing strategy.
In this guide, we’ll discuss the industry’s best practices, examples, and techniques to execute your multi-channel marketing strategy correctly. We also provide useful tools to streamline and improve your workflow.
At the end of this guide, you will learn practical methods to optimize engagement across various channels.
Jump to a section ✨
- Step 1: Set A Clear North Star
- Step 2: Get Inside Your Target Audience’s Mind
- Step 3: Evaluate Your Multi-Channel Marketing Platform Options
- Step 4: Write Compelling Multi-Channel Content That Sparks Engagement
- A. Audience Engagement
- B. SEO & Organic Reach
- C. Lead Generation & Nurturing
- D. Customer Retention & Loyalty
- Step 5: Streamline Your Workflow With Multi-Channel Tools
- Step 6: Test & Refine Your Multi-Channel Marketing Campaigns
3 Essential Elements Of A Successful Multi-Channel Marketing Strategy
These 3 core elements should always be present to get better results and stand out.
1. Establish Brand Consistency
Your brand identity, messaging, and visuals should always be consistent across all marketing platforms. This consistency increases your brand recognition, making it easier for customers to identify and connect with the brand. Fortune Restoration, a painting and restoration company, is a great example that sets a high standard in their industry for branding and messaging consistency.
Whether you scroll through their website or social media feeds, you will see the same:
- Professional imagery
- Consistent color schemes
- Messaging that highlights the brand’s dedication to quality and craftsmanship
The brand also uses a professional yet friendly tone. The professional tone reflects the brand’s expertise and reliability, while the friendly tone makes them approachable. This helps it connect with its customers on an emotional level.
Best Practice: Create A Brand Guideline
A brand style guide contains all the rules and requirements on how to present your brand to the customers. It will serve as a reference to your team when they create marketing and communication materials. Make sure to add these vital components to give your brand a strong identity:
- Brand’s voice instructions (authoritative, friendly, or professional)
- Recommended font styles, sizes, line spacing, and text alignment
- List of brand applications (advertising, packaging, and website design)
- Specifications on how to use the logo (size, color variations, and placement)
Make sure that all your team (marketing and sales) have access to the brand style guide and are well-trained on how to apply it in their work.
2. Leverage Customer Data
Customer data helps you better understand your existing and potential customers. The data could include what they like, where they typically shop, and how often they purchase. You can collect all the data you need using tools such as:
- Google Analytics
- Social media analytics (e.g., BuzzSumo or Facebook Insights)
- Customer relationship management (CRM) systems (e.g., HubSpot or Zendesk Sell)
All tools provide excellent features that track customer behavior, audience demographics, and other performance metrics. This data lets you personalize your multi-channel campaigns and messages to make them more relevant to each customer.
Incentives are powerful motivators for customers. So, provide an irresistible incentive program to promote the idea of fair trade, where both the customer and the business benefit.
You can take Bariatric Fusion‘s approach—offering a 15% discount when customers share their preferences or sign up for their newsletter, using pop-up and footer banners to initiate a relationship.
The discount helps them create a positive first impression and opens an opportunity for ongoing communication. The best part is that the pop-up banner is also built to turn new customers into loyal advocates.
The brand designed the pop-up banner based on the customer’s browsing history to achieve this goal. So, whenever they explore a product or add something to their cart, the pop-up banner will appear and promote its Subscribe & Save program. It’s one of their incentive programs that offers a 10% discount on every customer’s order.
For example, they recently browsed their Roux-en-Y gastric bypass vitamin list. A pop-up will appear promoting product categories related to these gastric bypass vitamins alongside the subscribe and save program.
Best Practice: Explain Data Use To Customers
Consumers are always cautious about sharing their information online, so explain how you will collect and use their data. At a glance, Bariatric Fusion’s privacy policy is similar to other brands—it thoroughly details its data collection and usage practices. However, it still stands out because it is transparent about fraudulent activities (and other risks) and puts preventive measures in place to mitigate them.
They also include clear instructions on how customers can opt out of their data collection process (if they wish). This shows the brand’s proactive dedication to customers’ privacy and security.
Once customers feel confident that your business can handle their information responsibly, they will trust your brand more.
3. Integrate Online & Offline Channels
The multi-channel approach is all about providing a unified customer experience. This means a customer can start their journey online and complete it offline, or vice versa.
Take Target, for example. The brand ensures smooth transactions online and offline using the ‘buy online and pick up in-store’ (BOPIS) strategy. Customers browse the products online and buy them in-store. This allows customers to verify the product in-store before taking it home.
If their customers are in a hurry, they can switch the order pickup to Drive Up. The process is the same. The only difference is that when the customer reaches the store, the staff will bring the orders to their vehicle to save them time and effort.
Best Practice: Provide A Single Profile Account
When integrating online and offline channels, create a single profile account. This lets customers:
- Manage profile
- Redeem rewards
- Track order history
- Initiate exchanges and returns
- Receive personalized offers and recommendations
6 Steps To Creating Your Multi-Channel Marketing Strategy
Here are 6 easy-to-follow steps that can maximize your multi-channel marketing strategy’s reach and impact. See how you can tailor each to suit your business goals.
Step 1: Set A Clear North Star
Setting goals gives your marketing efforts a sense of purpose and pinpoint benchmarks to measure success.
You can set your goals based on your business objectives. What does your business want to achieve? Is it increasing brand awareness, sales, or customer loyalty? Once you figure it out, set clear, attainable, and meaningful goals using the SMART method.
Let’s take a real-world example of a new headhunter agency. They aim to increase the number of qualified talents available for placements by 20% within 6 months. Here’s how the SMART method can help them set a clear, attainable, and meaningful goal:
- Specific: Define what “qualified talents” mean for their headhunter agency. The information they need could include the necessary skills, experience, qualifications, and attributes relevant to the client’s needs or job requirements.
- Measurable: Determine how they want to measure the talent pool increase. This could be based on the number of new registrations or resumes received. They can also use engagement metrics (application rates, response rates, etc.) to measure their outreach and networking efforts.
- Achievable: Assess whether their objective is feasible based on their available resources, team expertise, and market conditions. They should also consider any potential challenges or adjustments required along the way.
- Relevant: Provide a clear explanation of why this goal matters to the agency. Is it for helping client demands, improving placement rates, or supporting business growth?
- Time-bound: Setting a specific timeframe creates a sense of urgency and focus within the team, which helps maintain momentum and prevents procrastination. Create an action plan to track the progress.
Hiring global talents has its fair share of challenges. But with SMART goals, you can overcome them. Make sure your goals are flexible so that you can adjust them based on performance metrics or whenever the market conditions change. Also, document your goals and share them with the team so everyone is on the same page.
Step 2: Get Inside Your Target Audience’s Mind
Understanding your target audience goes deeper beyond their basic information. It’s about identifying what motivates them to buy a product or what challenges they face. These insights will help you create multi-channel marketing strategies that feel personalized and relevant to them.
Conducting market research helps you pinpoint new prospects within your industry. Look for existing studies and reports to get in-depth information and insights about industry trends, consumer behaviors, and market dynamics.
The best thing about market research is that it also serves as a learning tool. It keeps you and your team updated about your industry’s latest research, strategies, and technologies. For example, if you work in software development and target manufacturing companies, AlisQI offers valuable resources.
They offer helpful resources like customer case studies, whitepapers, and videos. All resources provide new ideas and approaches to how customers use their software for quality management, security, and compliance.
Here are 3 more research methods and tools that can help you identify and understand your target audience:
- Psychographic segmentation: Understand customers’ interests, lifestyles, and values through surveys, social media insights, and interviews.
- Social listening: Monitor and analyze consumers’ conversations on social media platforms using SproutSocial, Brandwatch Consumer Intelligence, and YouScan.
After collecting the necessary information, create buyer personas and customer journey maps. Buyer personas clarify who your ideal customers are and what their specific needs and pain points are. While customer journey maps outline the customer’s entire experience with a business. This covers their initial awareness way to post-purchase support.
When creating a customer journey map, make sure each stage aligns with the buyer persona’s behaviors and needs so you can tailor the customer experience based on their specific challenges and preferences.
Step 3: Evaluate Your Multi-Channel Marketing Platform Options
Now that you know your target audience, figure out next what online channels they are most active in to make sure your multi-channel efforts reach the right audience at the right time. It also helps you allocate your resources more effectively because you only focus on marketing channels that offer the best ROI (return on investment). Here’s what most multi-channel marketers use to connect with their audiences.
Social media platforms are where most people are active and engaged. This makes them an ideal platform to grow your brand awareness and drive engagement. Each social media platform has its own demographics and content formats. So, select the ones that match your target audience preferences and content marketing strategies.
Ovaeda, a composite fence panels and decking boards shop, is an excellent example of a brand that prioritizes image and video-based social media platforms. They use Facebook, Instagram, X, and Pinterest to show what their fence panels and decking boards look like after installation. They also use YouTube to showcase what their products are made of, how to use them properly, along with other DIY tutorials.
You can also pick other channels based on your marketing goals:
- Acquisition: Search Engines (e.g., Google, Bing)
Planning and publishing content consistently at the best time is never easy. That’s why most multi-channel marketers use social media tools like Flick. Not only can Flick publish on multiple channels at once, but it can also build your entire customer experience with utmost care. They deliver this through:
- Hands-on customer service
- Features to streamline your service
- Helpful training and advice to help your brand level up
Step 4: Write Compelling Multi-Channel Content That Sparks Engagement
Content serves as the foundation of your multi-channel marketing efforts. It’s how you communicate your brand’s message, story, and value that creates a direct and meaningful connection with your audience.
My favorite example is Vinyl Status where it takes an artistic storytelling approach to communicate its brand message and the value it offers. This is intended to match the brand’s products. Using high-resolution images and videos, they highlight the craftsmanship and unique detail of each custom vinyl sticker.
They also regularly feature customers’ content to give their audience fresh ideas and perspectives on bringing their vinyl sticker design to life. Giving the spotlight to your community members will make them feel valued and appreciated.
Other than strengthening your communication, content also plays a vital role in:
A. Audience Engagement
Audiences will engage with content when they feel a strong personal connection. This emotional bond drives them to take actions—likes, reactions, share, etc. You can encourage your audience to actively participate in your content by:
- Using clear CTAs that highlight its benefits
- Run surveys and polls to encourage feedback
- Offer exclusive content, rewards, or other incentives
- Publish interactive posts on social media (quizzes, contests, etc.)
- Open discussion opportunities (host webinars, forums, or live Q&As)
People respond to visuals better. So, invest in high-quality graphics to build a powerful impression. These graphics are versatile to use. No matter where you post them, they can quickly adapt to fit the specific format of each marketing channel.
B. SEO & Organic Reach
Search engines are your greatest ally in improving your brand’s visibility and ranking on SERPs, and SEO is the most cost-efficient way to enhance your marketing efforts. Make sure to apply the necessary on-page SEO elements to your content.
You can use Ahrefs and SEMrush to optimize your content. They provide a list of high-value keywords, conduct competitor analysis, and provide other technical SEO elements.
C. Lead Generation & Nurturing
Lead generation is finding quality leads to fill your marketing funnel. On the other hand, lead nurturing helps you convert the leads into loyal advocates. Both are crucial components of the customer acquisition process.
The good news is that content can support lead generation and nurturing. All you need to do is pick the right content type and format. For instance, educational content addresses your target audience’s pain points. If you provide a clear and reliable solution, your audience will surely want it.
Take this opportunity to encourage your audience to join your community. You can gate your educational content (eBook or guide) behind a lead capture form. Once they sign up, they can download the content for free. You can use predictive lead scoring (Outfunnel or Factors) to determine whether the lead is good or not.
You can also consider these content types and formats to strengthen your lead generation and nurturing efforts.
- FAQs
- Webinars
- Testimonials
- Whitepapers
- Case studies
- Email campaigns
- interactive content (assessments or quizzes)
D. Customer Retention & Loyalty
Give your audience something to look forward to with your brand so they will keep coming back. Send regular updates that cover your products/services, promotions, recommendations, or important milestones.
Share customer reviews and user-generated content with your preferred channels. When your audience sees real people sharing their positive experiences with your brand, they will trust you more. They might even endorse your brand with their own social networks, boosting your reputation.
Step 5: Streamline Your Workflow With Multi-Channel Tools
Managing all your multiple platforms and marketing campaigns at once can be time-consuming. Integrating all your marketing tools will simplify the process.
Since everything is in a single interface, it will promote better collaboration among your team members. They can launch, monitor, and optimize campaigns across various channels quickly. They can even resolve issues quickly, which improves customer retention. Here’s a list of the must-have tools you should learn about:
- Ad Management: Schedule ads and automate bidding strategies to achieve better results (e.g., Google Ads and Facebook Ads Manager)
- Content Management Systems (CMS): Manage all content, from creation to publication, to reduce redundancy and errors (e.g., WordPress and Shopify)
- Marketing automation: Help your team automate repetitive tasks like social media posting and sending email campaigns (e.g., GetResponse and ActiveCampaign)
- CRM Systems: Provide your team a 360-degree view of each customer profile, task progress, and interaction history (e.g., Zoho CRM and Pipedrive)
- Social media management: Integrate your social media platforms to plan and schedule posts in advance and receive alerts when someone mentions your brand or puts negative sentiments (e.g., Flick)
Before you integrate your multi-channel marketing tools, make sure they are all compatible with each other. This compatibility ensures that your tools can share data seamlessly and streamline workflows without causing disruptions.
Step 6: Test & Refine Your Multi-Channel Marketing Campaigns
Now that your campaign is running, you will know what’s working and what’s not. Use these insights to test and optimize your current and future campaigns.
Testing lets you experiment and create different versions of your marketing campaigns. Each version includes different elements–headlines, calls to action, or visuals. Using the A/B testing method, you can compare the versions’ performances and see which one receives better results. When performing A/B testing, test one element at a time. This will make identifying which element works and what’s not easier.
How do you decide which elements to test? You can conduct a survey to get your audience’s opinions. Ask them which elements resonate best with their interest and which do not. You can also use web analytics to know what to improve. Here are the signs that an element needs improvement:
- High bounce rates on websites or email
- Low conversion rates on ads, email campaigns, or landing pages
- Social media posts have low engagement metrics (few likes, shares, or comments)
- Cost to acquire a new customer (CPA) is way too high compared to the revenue it generates
When testing your multi-channel marketing campaigns, document every process and result. This will serve as a guideline for your team when they build future campaigns. They will ensure that previous successes are included and avoid unsuccessful strategies.
How Flick Can Help Your Multi-Channel Marketing
With Flick’s AI Assistant Iris, you’ll be able to multi-channel market your products and services quicker than ever before (and more effectively!). Iris will help you stay consistent, save time, create high-quality content, and save you money, and that’s just the start!
No matter how much or how little you need her, Iris is the helping hand for any small business owner, social media manager, agency, and anything in between. For those days when you’ve got a creative block or just don’t have the time to spend on creating the perfect content strategy, Iris will craft ideas, create captions, make AI images and graphics, put together a social media strategy, and so much more.
Let Iris:
- Plan and create 75% of your social media marketing content
- Create weekly or monthly social media plans based on your biz
- Design and create graphics in your brand’s style
- Write captions in your exact brand voice
- Discover viral content to create tailored to your brand
- Turn any media you have into engaging posts
- Optimize and schedule your content
Ready to get started? Start a FREE trial of Flick to test out Iris today!
Conclusion
Building a winning multi-channel marketing strategy requires careful planning and proper coordination of different marketing channels. When selecting a channel, don’t limit yourself to the popular ones. Always consider: Are there opportunities to collaborate with your community members who can intensify your message?
If you need help, Flick, an all-in-one social media marketing platform, can help you stay organized and productive on your socials. Explore our website to learn more about the features and functions.
More articles related to
How to Use Social Media as a Real Estate Agent
Are you a real estate agent and not sure what to post on social media? Here’s how to effectively use social media as a real estate agent.
Mackenzie Taylor
Last week
6 Ways to Use Social Listening for Customer Service
Many don’t know how to use social listening to improve customer service. This article is here to help you understand social listening and exactly how to use it for better customer service.
Guest Post
5 days ago
Free AI Tools To Check Out In 2024
Looking for an AI tool that won’t break the bank? What about a free one? Here’s our top favorite FREE AI tools to try today.
Mackenzie Taylor
Last week