Some people are put off by the term “cross-channel advertising,”
although the notion is pretty straightforward.
While multi-channel marketing employs many channels to reach your audience
(for example, sponsored search, organic search, and social media),
cross-channel marketing leverages those various channels
to offer a more linked experience for your audience.
As a result, even if customers go back and forth across channels,
they are still on a consistent customer experience.
Cross-channel marketing has numerous advantages, such as higher engagement,
better insights, and a stronger brand—but only if done correctly.
What is Cross-Channel Marketing?
Cross-channel marketing is the use of many marketing channels
to create a more seamless customer journey for your target demographic.
Channels should collaborate to generate a linked message that connects one to the other.
Marketers may use people-based marketing to develop complete profiles
that assist in customise the customer experience
and establish loyalty by connecting with customers at many touch-points.
Challenges of Cross-Channel Marketing
Cross-channel marketing may be difficult because it takes a simple,
streamlined customer experience and turns it into something much more subtle and complex.
Initially, establishing a cross-channel campaign necessitates measuring a
large number of media channels – and the number of channels is growing.
Many companies are falling behind the curve when it comes to embracing new platforms,
which results in a few typical issues.
1. Reaching Audiences at the Right Time
With so many marketing channels available, it can be difficult for marketers
to choose the best one to reach their target audience at the correct moment.
With so many alternatives, predicting the optimal location and time to reach customers
may be tricky, especially
because many of these platforms may be experiencing fluctuations in both user intent and advertising/marketing capabilities.
According to 40% of marketers, the most difficult problem
is utilizing sophisticated techniques to reach their target audience at the correct moment.
Media planners must choose the optimum time to display advertising across platforms while adhering to best practices for each channel.
What works for a TV commercial will not work for a Facebook
post, and strategists must be mindful of what messaging will be most effective for each medium.
2. Achieving High Data Quality for Better Insights
Many companies continue to struggle with data quality.
Approximately 34% of data executives say they wish to better
integrate data insights into their company’s decision-making processes.
However, 42 percent of consumer analytics experts report that data quality is their most difficult problem.
The quantity of data that businesses collect is always rising,
and it is critical to determine which data is valuable for boosting efficiency and analyzing customer behaviour.
The greater the quality of the data, the more accurate the insights,
implying that businesses may make more data-driven marketing decisions.
Marketers struggle to generate meaningful, person-level insights
that can utilized to drive future decision-making in the absence of high-quality data.
3. Picking the Right Advertising Channels
Choosing the best advertisement.
Most businesses struggle with media channels because it is difficult to know where and when their target audience spends the majority of their time.
Because not all channels will reach your target demographic,
it is critical to understand the customer on a granular level.
When developing a cross-channel strategy, campaigns must collaborate across
the channels that your target audience uses to maximize
the likelihood of putting your message in front of them at the appropriate moment.
Consider the value of each channel and its location in the consumer journey
when selecting an advertising channel.
It’s also vital to remember the campaign’s principal
goal: is it to capture leads?
How do you generate impressions?
Increase participation?
Whatever the case may be, you must choose which channel will be able
to provide you with the desired outcomes.
4. Utilize the Right Marketing Technology
Strong analytics are what provide us with meaningful insights into our customers’ preferences,
therefore you must select a marketing system that collects accurate, high-quality data.
Another important feature to consider when deciding
which tool would best meet your company’s demands is automation.
Marketers may obtain a more comprehensive insight into
their target audience by implementing the proper marketing performance solution.
Marketing technology should, among other things,
allow the marketing team to optimize:
When they broadcast advertisements,
Which channels do they show their advertisements on, and
They utilize messaging to engage with their intended audience.
An efficient marketing technology stack should assist to streamline communications
and establish a unified customer experience that identifies and utilizes
the channels and content that your target audience is most engaged with.
Cross-channel advertising mistakes to avoid (and how)
Cross-channel marketing includes more than just advertising across different channels.
Let’s go over the most typical mistakes I see people make when advertising on Google,
Facebook, Linked In, and other platforms—and what to do instead.
1. Delivering inconsistent messages
This will be the most simple advice in this piece, yet you might be shocked at how many businesses make this error.
You must maintain your messaging constant
whether someone is searching for you on Google or Bing,
seeing you as they read through their Facebook or Instagram feeds,
or keeping up on industry news on LinkedIn and Twitter.
To be clear, you SHOULD tailor your ad wording to each platform,
the demographic you’re targeting on each site, and where they are in their mental range.
However, you should not have a Google headline that claims all goods are
15% off the first purchase while Facebook says it’s 10% off.
Or a LinkedIn ad claiming to be #1 on G2 Crowd but a Twitter ad claiming to be #2.
2. Running the same offers on every channel
You know from experience that when you’re on Instagram,
you’re in a different mentality than when you’re on LinkedIn or looking on Google.
Your audience is no exception.
So, if a specific offer performs well on Google but not on Facebook,
the issue may not be with your Facebook ad content or creative, but with the offer itself.
Consider this LinkedIn ad that Litmus is running.
They are making available their State of Email Service Providers report.
3. Having the same KPIs for each channel
Each channel in a cross-channel advertising plan must have its own set of goals and KPIs.
Facebook’s CTR will not be the same as LinkedIn’s.
And neither of those will be in the same league as Twitter.
The same is true for your cost-per-conversion targets.
If you know that leads on Facebook are of lesser quality than leads on LinkedIn,
you may be able to set a lower acceptable CPA on Facebook.
On the other hand, you might argue that LinkedIn leads are so good
that you’re ready to spend double the account average for them.
The same may be said about ROAS and lifetime value.
Make sure you understand not only the current performance goals for each channel,
but also the overall value generated by each channel (if feasible), and define KPIs accordingly.
4. Being rigid with budget
So many clients will come to me and say something similar to this.
“This month, our budget is $50,000.
We want to spend $20,000 on Facebook, $25,000 on Search, and $5,000 on LinkedIn.”
Great.
Wonderful.
I’m glad you’re ready for this meeting.
But I always object to this.
It’s good to be structured, but one channel might significantly underperform
or outperform its historical average in any given month.
You’re missing out if you’re not adapting to and capitalizing on these trends.
It’s OK to state you have a $50,000 budget and want to run advertisements on Search,
Facebook, and LinkedIn, and maybe even provide some ballpark figures.
However, as the month progresses,
it is in your best interest to monitor how each channel is performing in comparison to its average,
as well as how efficiently they are providing value in comparison to each other.
If you need to transfer $10,000 to LinkedIn, do so.
If you need to stop anything completely, do so.
Begin with a strategy, then be flexible to maximize performance within the time constraints you’ve been given.
5. Creating inconsistent retargeting audiences
You can establish retargeting audiences on
virtually every online marketing channel where you may target visitors.
These will vary from platform to platform, but you should be able to cover the same ground.
If you use retargeting audiences to target prior website
visitors who haven’t purchased on one platform, you should do so across all of them
(as long as performance permits).
Even more significantly, if you exclude users from a campaign on one platform,
you should do it on all of them.
This will be added to the ad messaging area.
Users may become perplexed if they receive communications on certain platforms
but not others due to exclusion.
You’re also wasting money on users who shouldn’t be in those audiences.
6. Not using Google Analytics for tracking
One of the most common objections I hear when people
begin cross-channel marketing is, “but we don’t know what is generating sales.”
First and foremost, this is a false narrative.
You’ll never fully KNOW what’s driving your sales until you just have one channel of business.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: if there was a 100 percent correct attribution platform,
that creator would be a household name because they’d be wealthy.
But just because something isn’t flawless doesn’t mean it’s not necessary for success.
It’s nice that each platform has its pixel or tracking capabilities.
The bad news is that each platform almost always claims more credit than it deserves.
This isn’t just due to a desire to demonstrate their worth,
but also to a lack of technology to cross-check other platforms.
To be clear, no platform will ever do this since it isn’t in their best interests.
As a result, having a third-party source of truth for your cross-channel marketing is critical.
Google Analytics is the most frequent and presumably simplest solution.
Even though created by Google,
it does not place its ad platform on a higher pedestal
than any other when it comes to monitoring in analytics.
Every Google Analytics objective will be assigned based on a last non-direct click model.
That is, whichever channel provided the click before the conversion
(assuming it was not a direct website visit)
will be credited with the conversion.
Don’t skimp on the tracking setup while putting your cross-channel initiatives in place.
Ensure that all of your channels are tracked consistently in your single source of
truth so that you can make educated optimization decisions.
7. Ignoring non-converters
Although we would like that all channels drive direct conversions, that is just not the case.
In most situations, several channels are engaged in a user’s path to conversion
(which is the whole idea of cross-channel marketing),
so it’s critical to understand what function each channel is playing and when it’s playing it.
The Assisted Conversions report may show you how many conversions each channel
or campaign contributed to,
even if they were not the most recent non-direct touch.
A more detailed analysis may seen in the Multi-Channel Funnel,
Top Conversion Path Reports, where you can examine the source/medium, campaign,
or other user flow from their initial touch-point through conversion.
Conclusion
By utilising the data insights gained from your marketing campaign
You may constantly update your cross-channel marketing approach to guarantee
that it is producing actual results.
All of these errors, as you can see, are preventable.
Cross-channel marketing yields excellent results if you invest time and effort into your approach.
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