By Raushn Jha
Consumers move to different places, and if you want to tap into a larger consumer base, you need to reach them through multiple mediums; This is where multi-channel marketing comes in. A study indicates that customers make purchasing decisions after touching products 6-8 times through different mediums. Research indicates that touchpoints across multiple channels increase brand awareness and ultimately this increases conversation rate.
People use multiple devices these days to access different platforms, so marketers need to target their potential consumers wherever they go and spend most of their time. When a person sees a brand multiple times on multiple platforms, they are more likely to buy from that brand because they think they know that brand.
With multi-channel marketing, marketers will be able to retrieve more data, such as a customer’s behavior across different platforms. Marketers can create their marketing strategy accordingly for future campaigns, which will give them a better result.
Statistics show that more than 50% of brands use more than three platforms to target their potential/existing customers. A hubspot study shows that 92% of marketers leverage more than one channel and 81% leverage more than three. According to a survey, the top channels used by B2B marketers are social media, websites/blogs, email marketing, and content marketing. And the top channels used by B2C marketers are social media, email marketing, website/blog, and influencer marketing. Here we can see an increase in influencer marketing because people are likely to buy something more often if they see an influencer endorsing it, so influencer marketing has become an essential part of marketing multichannel for any brand.
Multi-channel marketing is even more essential these days because there are so many distractions and it’s hard to get noticed by a customer unless marketers reach out to them where they are. So it doesn’t matter if someone only reads email, someone just uses the web, and someone spends an entire day on Instagram, if marketers are everywhere, they will draw attention to the one or the other place.
Multichannel marketing helps marketers find new customers, retarget existing customers, understand customer demographics, analyze customer journeys, and more.
While doing multi-channel marketing, a marketer must implement a unified customer view; it will help them track customers, their communications and purchases across the channel; this data will help them target potential customers with personalized marketing messages. Research reveals that around 59% of customers who experience any kind of personalization from the brand have an impact on their purchasing decisions.
The younger generation uses multiple platforms for multiple things, and they use multiple channels to research a brand before purchasing anything from said brand. In this scenario, marketers should be where they find them. Marketers also need to know who finds where. This information can only be obtained if they do multi-channel marketing and will have more data to analyze; what is going well, where it is going well, where we can improve things, etc.
According to a report, from 2010 to 2014, the average number of channels used by a buyer before conversion increased from 1.25 to 3.25. These days, even if a customer is going to buy something from a physical store, they search for that product online and hold back on their purchase until they get more information about that particular product; for this, they use several channels. So focusing only on one marketing channel is not enough for any marketer/brand where most of them operate multiple channels which helps them to increase conversation rate.
The author is founder and CEO of PDP Media. The opinions expressed are personal.
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