In today’s hyperconnected world, where consumers are bombarded with a constant stream of information, the fight for attention is fiercer than ever. With 73% of shoppers using multiple channels during their shopping journey, cross-channel marketing is a useful tool for marketers to help guide potential customers towards a purchase decision and to personalise their approach during the process.

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What Is Cross-Channel Marketing?

Cross-channel marketing is a strategy brands use to connect with customers across multiple communication channels such as, social media, blog articles and email. The key aspect is that these channels are all connected to each other with branding and messaging being consistent across all channels.

Benefits of Cross-Channel Marketing

• A consistent brand across your digital channels helps to create a recognisable brand identity and builds trust among customers
• It expands reach as your different customer segments might hang out in different spaces online.
• Engaging customers across multiple channels increases the likelihood of capturing their attention and driving them towards conversion.
• It creates a seamless buyer journey while a potential customer moves across touchpoints in the marketing funnel.

Top tips for Cross-Channel Marketing:
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1. ‍Know your customer personas
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   How do your different target customers behave online? What are their preferred communication channels at what stage of the buyer journey? It’s important to have a deep understanding of your customers to not only know where to target them but also how best to tailor your content to ensure it resonates and ultimately maximises engagement metrics and conversions.

2. Adapt content for each channel
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   While consistency in brand messaging is important, you’d be missing a trick if you didn’t personalise your content to fit the unique characteristics and audience expectations of each channel. You can also use different channels to serve different stages of the customer funnel from awareness to conversion to retention.
   
   Examples of content tailored to the customer journey stage:
   
   
   • ‍Awareness - this is the first time someone comes across your brand. At this stage you might post educational or entertaining content which maximises reach or work with creators on collaboration posts to tap into their audience.‍
   • Consideration - this could be a follower you want to keep engaged and introduce to the specifics of your business and products. Examples of content could be testimonial videos or product walk-throughs.‍
   • Decision - this is the stage of conversion to a customer/subscriber/user. You might have more sales-related content such as promotions and discounts.‍
   • Loyalty - nurturing an existing customer. Example content would be tutorials, FAQs or tips and tricks.
     
     

3. Cross-channel testing
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   When putting together content for socials, don’t just look at social media analytics. You can look at your email newsletters to see what content and links your existing customers are interacting with the most. Equally, looking at the blog posts on your website with the highest click-through rates will also give you an idea of what content is already resonating with your existing customers. So off of one article, you can create posts for your different social channels, repurposing those same content ideas. 
   
   If you want to go a level deeper, you can also use your other channels to test the captions and visuals for your post. For example, if you’re deciding between two pieces of copy, you can run the two versions of text as two separate digital ad variants with a small budget behind them, targeting your ideal customer profile. Compare the results on engagement and click-through rates to determine the most impactful messaging.

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4. Automation tools
   
   It’s important you have templates and guidelines in place to ensure there is a level of consistency across all channels. Having all your assets organised and tagged in a repository will save you a lot of time. This is where automation tools can help with scaling this process from providing sizing templates for different social platforms to scheduling content.

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5. Analyse Your Strategy with Data
   
   Data analytics helps marketers identify opportunities for cross-channel optimization by analyzing how different channels interact and influence each other throughout the customer journey. By understanding how users move between channels and touchpoints, marketers can create more cohesive and integrated cross-channel experiences. Attribution modelling also helps marketers understand the impact of each marketing touchpoint on the customer journey and conversion process. By analysing data from various channels and touchpoints, you can determine which channels and content contribute most to conversions and revenue generation - so you know where to focus your resources.

By implementing cross-channel marketing strategies effectively, brands can not only expand their reach but also create a seamless and personalised buyer journey that guides potential customers towards conversion. Understanding customer personas, adapting content for each channel, and leveraging automation tools are key components of a successful cross-channel marketing strategy. By following these best practices and continually testing and optimising content across channels, marketers can maximise engagement, build brand loyalty, and drive meaningful results in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Image credit: Stephen Phillips | hostreviews.co.uk