What did you do yesterday? Perhaps you were at work? Perhaps you were out and about, visiting friends and family? Regardless of how you spent your day think about the amount of times you came face-to-face with a piece of marketing collateral, be it on your Instagram, TV screen, an email or as you were driving past that giant billboard, chances are you experienced several integrated marketing messages.
It’s what your customers expect
There has been a noticeable shift in how brands and consumers communicate with one another. What was once a narrow one-way street of communication, is now a two-way, multilane motorway! Customers now expect to be able to interact with a brand on their terms, when it suits them and with their preferred channel. Some customers prefer to interact on social media, whilst others may prefer to submit an enquiry via email, a website or even with a telephone call. Customers are no longer surprised that their interactions with a brand are totally seamless across a selection of channels, it’s what they now expect from a brand. Marketing continues to evolve and adapt with these changing consumer behaviours. A marketing campaigns can quickly fail to deliver if SEO has been overlooked or the website is poorly designed. Effective marketing campaigns deliver incremental benefits including customer satisfaction, brand awareness and positive word of mouth naturally leading to increased business opportunities. Regardless of a brands product or service the sequence of marketing messages and communication networks should gradually build a relationship with your target audience, guiding them through to a point of sale, contact or lead generation.
Marketing channels are on the rise
Nowadays the marketing landscape has expanded and continues to do so with a fantastic, dynamic range of marketing channels both online and offline. The added bonus of this is increased audience insights and significantly more granular targeting capabilities. This presents a unique opportunity for businesses to increase their campaign exposure by leveraging a combination marketing channels that are accurately targeted to their target audience. You might have an aging demographic that use social media however also read the paper, or perhaps your targeting senior IT stakeholders who attend high profile events and network on LinkedIn. It’s about working out which platforms your customers are on and when, then building out an integrated campaign approach to shout your marketing message from all the relevant rooftops.
It will maximise the ROI on your marketing investment
Justifying the ROI on any marketing activity is a non-negotiable, irrespective of the size of the budget or business. Moving away from single channel marketing tactics to an integrated marketing mix of online and offline channels has shown increases in marketing ROI by 20%. A consistent brand message across platforms compounds your marketing message, boosting ad recall and brand awareness. Marketing activity with multiple touch points provide a wide variety of metrics into which channels, content and messaging are outperforming others giving valuable insights into future marketing forecasting and campaign assets. This information becomes imperative to justifying future marketing investment. It’s important to remember not one size fits all, continue to delve into campaign analytics and use these learnings to develop a deeper understanding of key customer segments and the channels they use. With this approach, ongoing marketing activity will continue to deliver insights into customer demographics and consumer behaviour for more informed and tailored future marketing campaigns.
With a few tweaks to the planning and implementation of a marketing strategy, an omni-channel campaign approach can quickly elevate a business above and beyond its competitors whilst also improving the overall customer experience and amplifying that all important brand message. However, too often a lack of budget, a hard and fast deadline or a gap in cross-platform data is thwarting businesses from adapting a multi-channel marketing strategy. However, in this day and age, it’s absolutely vital to push through these barriers and embrace a multi-channelled marketing approach with wide-open arms!
Are you looking to integrate a multi-channel marketing strategy into your business? Feel free to get in touch for a chat about your marketing requirements – hello@colourinmedia.com.
