The world is more connected now than it has ever been.  With the internet and mobile technology becoming increasingly integrated into our daily lives, there have never been more channels through which to reach consumers.  But with so many channels, it has also never been more of a balancing act.  It can seem like a real challenge to home in on which channels are best and how much to allocate to them, but a holistic understanding of your marketing strategy can yield enormous results.  The right combination of channels, as well as cooperation between those channels, is the key to your success.

Cross-channel marketing is the strategic integration of your various channels into a seamless experience that increases customer exposure to your brand and guides them towards purchases.  Which channels you choose to emphasize in your strategy will require a lot of important data, but it will yield more data in return.  Consider the demographics of your target audience: age, gender, devices, income, occupation, and interests are all going to play a factor in which channels to target more aggressively.  For example, since Edison reports that 95% of Baby Boomers say they use email to communicate in their personal lives, you may engage this demographic through email from a home computer. On the other hand, it might be wiser to target Millennials through their mobile devices. This group may be more enticed by social media engagement and app-based experiences.  To cater through the improper platform would be to bark up the wrong tree.

Through studying reported data to measure important KPIs, you should gain a more comprehensive understanding of your customers’ journey through your various platforms and portals.  Pay mind to how and why a customer may have reached any given stage of their purchase.  Were they brought here by an email promotion?  Search engine results?  Social media link? Are they a returning customer?  A registered member of your platform?  Did they abandon a full cart at any moment in the sales funnel, and could they be remarketed to?  The answers to these questions are powerful tools that will help you optimize your next moves.  By consolidating these data into customer relationship management tools, marketing calendars, and buyer personas, you can study changes and trends in the engagement patterns of your customers.

As you attune your strategy to the data you have acquired, the advantages of cross-channel marketing should become clearer.  You now have the means to more sharply focus your approach through personalized marketing methods while increasing brand exposure through seamless cross-platform customer experiences. This mean optimizing SEO, increasing social engagement, adding display advertising, developing print and mailing campaigns and using promotions to increase brand awareness.  Targeted advertisements, email listings, paid placements on search engines, and social media posts should all lead a customer towards a purchase, but these all work more effectively when they are operating in a coordinated, interlinked system.  For example, you can follow up an online transaction with a thank you email and an invitation to a newsletter, or target deals to previous customers based on their past buying history and engagements across your platforms.  These linked channels not only create greater exposure, but also  form a concise pathway to a purchase.  Greater visibility creates more opportunities for a customer to engage with a brand, gradually funneling them towards a point of sale.   These separate points all work in harmony making the process more effective at converting audiences, streamlining transactions, increasing sales, and improving customer satisfaction.

The benefits of diversifying and refining your marketing strategy should be an enticing enough proposition on its own tactical merit, but recent data gives concrete proof that more connected engagement pays dividends.  The average consumer today experiences triple the marketing touchpoints before purchasing than it did 20 years ago.  Brands using more channels have higher purchase rates.  Strong cross-channel engagement is creating more returning customers. The tools of marketing are rapidly evolving, and companies that apply those tools well are proving their explosive potential.  To ignore the data is to leave money on the table.  Applying strategic SEO that improves results rankings on search engines makes it easier for your company be found by someone conducting an organic search. By adding a social media presence, blog, or email campaign, you could be substantially widening the scope of your influence and converting more visitors into purchasers.  Experiment, see what works, and adjust accordingly.  It may take time to see results from your efforts in one channel, but expanding your outreach can still yield valuable insights in the short term while the rest of your plan plays out.