Multi-Channel Marketing Masterstroke

With mobile networks and smartphones all around, our media consumption habits have evolved. We are no longer glued to a single screen. Our attention is divided to two screens or more! In a 2018 report by Nielsen, 45% of adults in the US regularly check their phones while watching television. This phenomenon is coined as second screen viewing.

As a business, you should be capitalising on this behaviour by implementing your marketing strategies on a variety of channels and platforms. It’ll help you to engage and reach out to more customers on their preferred channel. According to research by Invesp, companies that engage with their customers across multiple channels have a loyalty retention rate of 89%.

Coherent Messaging

When you are structuring your multi-channel plan, you need to be certain that your brand messages will be consistent and coherent across your different channels. As I’ve mentioned in my other book, you have to ensure that the tone of voice and visual imagery is aligned with the brand guidelines. So before you start planning your strategy, you need to do your homework by clearly positioning your service or product, and the values for which your brand stands for. Eventually, you’ll end up with a fixed tone of voice and visual language for your brand.

Choosing and Prioritising Channels

With such a wide selection of channels to choose from, you need to narrow down your options by considering your given budget and customers’ profiles. I will list down some channels that are worth considering, in order of decreasing efficiency. Ultimately, if your product or service resonates with your customers, they will still come to you even if you don’t choose the ideal channel mix.

1. Video Advertisements

If you think a carefully crafted 2000-word blog post is going to impress your customers, good luck.

An engaging, relevant and short video will deliver your message better than anything else. Whether your customers are in line for a coffee at Starbucks or waiting for their public transportation, their eyes are transfixed to their smartphones. They’ll be busy scrolling through social media and watching videos that pique their interest. And that’s when your advertisement pops up and they are inevitably exposed to your brand.

With a video advertisement, you can easily customise and adapt it to fit any given format. It’ll get you the most bang out of your buck too, as you can just repurpose that one video for any channel, medium or platform. You can shorten it for YouTube, change it from landscape to portrait for Instagram, or add extra footage if necessary. Needless to say, a well-produced video usually does not come cheap, but it is worth every cent.

2. Email and In-App Communication

Despite the amount of spam and unwanted emails we receive every day, direct email marketing is still a relevant way to influence your target customer. It’s an art to craft these emails in a way that nails the creative idea and shares useful information, so that it doesn’t end up in the spam folder.

When writing these emails, you need to align your content to the recipient's context. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and ask yourself what could be at the top of their minds as they move in and out of the conversion funnel, and then plan your content accordingly. A top of the funnel prospect is not yet ready to buy and thus requires more educational content. As you go down the funnel, you can use sales-oriented communication, since you have nurtured your lead well.

If you have a mobile application, you can take the additional step of using push notifications and in-app messaging to interact with your users. Recently, I read an article that said the lock screen of your phone is your new inbox, I couldn’t agree more.

3. Roadshows and Webinars

Having face time with your customers is important, especially when there’s a need for a high level of trust to sell your offering. All you need is a spacious venue, a memorable pitch deck, and an excellent presentation. They all sound fairly simple but difficult to master. Because, when creating them, usually you focus on the content and ignore ancillary things like audio quality, lighting and video quality, props and frame composition. By investing a bit more in audio and tech equipment and paying extra attention to how you frame the subject in your video, your videos will be of better quality. Remember that the video will live on the internet forever, so you should put out your best effort.

Organising a roadshow is time and energy consuming, and it's not scalable. But it does a good job in appealing to the audience’s emotions and creating demand for your offering. Alternatively, you could host a weekly webinar if there are too many constraints for a physical event.

4. Marketing Offline

Even if all of your customers are all on digital platforms, there is still a place for marketing and advertising on offline channels such as Out-Of-Home (OOH) media, radio, cinema, and snail mail. These channels are considered old-fashioned and are often overlooked by online businesses, but this is exactly why they might work for you: your digital competitors ignore them. If your competitors are all marketing digitally, then it could be the right opportunity for you to try offline channels.

Out of all the offline channels, OOH media is a stand-out performer. Not only does it have the lowest cost per impression compared to other channels, OOH advertising revenue has shown consistent growth over the years. In 2018, Out-Of-Home Advertising Association of America reported that OOH advertising revenue increased by 4.5% compared to the previous year.

Besides building brand awareness, choosing OOH media sends a message to your customers that you’re reputable. If you look at the types of companies that advertise on traditional media, you’ll find well-established organisations such as banks, multinational conglomerates, and government agencies.

Measuring the Channel’s Effectiveness

The first step to measuring effectiveness is to understand how your customer found out about your business. From this piece of information, you would have a better gauge of how to budget for your channels. However, it can be a challenge to truly measure the effectiveness of your chosen channels.

To do so, you’ll have to understand the second and third order effects of these channels. Sometimes the benefits of a particular channel can’t be taken from face value: one channel could be influencing the effectiveness of the other.

For example, the advertisement that you had placed in an MRT station might be influencing people to log into Facebook to check out the advertisement you put up on there. Subsequently, your Facebook advertisement might convince the same people to subscribe to your newsletter. These are second and third degree impacts respectively.

The degree of second and third order effects can be very difficult to assess. By pulling out an advertisement from any channel, the results of the other advertisements could be affected too. You might have to laboriously go through numerous cycles of pulling out from one channel at a time and evaluating the impact of the taken down advertisement.

The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Even after you have a plan in hand, there are a few considerations to keep in mind before executing your multi-channel marketing strategy. When it comes to multi-channel marketing, there is a lot of coordination needed for it to be truly effective. I’ll share with you some of the mistakes that I’ve made, so that you won’t have to repeat them.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

1. Losing Coherence

As I’ve mentioned earlier, coherence is an important principle when you’re marketing across multiple channels – so be sure to have in place the right set of guidelines for your brand’s tone of voice and visual language.

Based on my experience, it becomes even more challenging to maintain coherence as you scale across different countries. As a rule of thumb, the further you branch out from your headquarters, the more complex it is to keep things tidy.

2. Insufficiently Familiar

With so many different channels, narrative styles and languages, it is very difficult to adapt your piece of content across all of them. Just think of a cinema advertisement, and compare it to the versions that are featured in a story on Instagram or in an e-mail newsletter – they are all so different. But you’ve got to be familiar with these mediums, so that you can convey your message coherently and effectively.

The message should come through as native for each touchpoint used. To do that, you need to have channel-specific expertise, either in-house or through an agency. Try to learn from past mistakes and develop an internal blueprint of what works and what doesn’t for each touchpoint.

3. Not Being Efficient

There is a tendency for businesses to "reinvent the wheel", which makes them inefficient. Try to make do with the material and content that you already have at your disposal. Since you’ve already invested so much time and resources at creating those content, repurposing these existing content would make distribution across different touchpoints more efficient.

For example, a minute-long interview in front of a whiteboard can be repurposed into a video, a podcast, and a blog article. Additionally, excerpts from the video can be shared on several social media platforms and in email newsletters, where the static whiteboard can be edited in post-production to show engaging infographics.

Time Is of the Essence

In my 13 years of experience with startups, I have yet to see a Gantt chart that is totally accurate. The startup world is crazy and unpredictable; there isn't a rule book that indicates the most ideal timing to create a multi-channel campaign. However, amidst the chaos, there is one constant: the sense of urgency.

When you’re starting up a business, you don’t have a lot of data on your hands and it is too costly to study in advance the impact of your marketing efforts. In such a given scenario, time is more precious than gold. The sooner you start testing and experimenting, the sooner you'll learn what moves the needle and what doesn’t work.

Don't be afraid to give yourself tight deadlines and push yourself to act with relentless pace – make those mistakes early on and learn from them quickly. Fight the perfectionist that lies deep inside every marketer, as you’ll need to act with a sense of urgency.

Work will always fill up the time that you set aside for it. You can test this theory out for yourself by deliberately shortening your deadline. You’ll be surprised that even within this shortened time frame, you’re still able to finish your project on time.

No Shortcuts

Never compromise on quality or renege on your promises even when you’ve got a lot on your plate. All of these can harm your brand reputation in one way or another. Trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets. One small error can snowball into a huge problem or crisis for your brand reputation and take years to rebuild.

For example, if you made the decision to share new content every Monday, no matter what happens you should keep your implicit promise and deliver it. At the same time, don’t rush through the proofreading and counterchecking of the content. Like investments, quality content returns compound over time.

1. Instill a Process to Guarantee Coherence

There is no place for a silo mentality in your workplace. You need to adopt a system where your various departments and stakeholders are able to communicate with one another to be on the same page. Without proper communication between your departments, your marketing strategy will end up being fragmented and incoherent.

2. Find an Unobtrusive Way to Get Customer Data

Customer data is a precious commodity in this digital age. You should be finding ways of extracting information from your customers without jeopardising their experience with your brand. If you want your customers to do a survey, you should keep your questions short and maybe incentivise them. With the extracted information, you’ll get insights that would help you to understand your customers better and fine-tune your customer-centric marketing efforts.

3. Understand the Second and Third Level Order Effects of Your Channels

If you’re wondering how you could assess the value of your chosen channels, you can try pulling out your advertisements on a particular channel and analyse its effects. There are a number of attribution models that you can adopt such as first interaction, time decay, and last non-direct click.