Cross-Channel Marketing
At the turn of the millennium, technology took off in a way like never before. We live in a technological era that leaves no room for limitations. When thinking of how advanced technology has become, think about how it can aid your business platform. Marketing and branding will always be your strongest asset to building a solid foundation for your business, music, service or products.
You have to determine which marketing strategies are right for you. With all the technology, there are very few limitations if any as to how you can create your marketing strategies. Email marketing, Social media marketing, web marketing, digital marketing and search engine marketing are a few ways you can develop your marketing strategy.
Cross-channel marketing gives you the ability to engage with prospects and customers across multiple channels, devices or platforms. Email, social media, the web, smartphones, laptops, tablets, desktops. It doesn't matter how you choose to connect with a profoundly integrated experience for customers. They want you to be there to assist them at all times.
So what works for your business and you and how do you supply this experience to your customers? Metrics and analysis are an important part of how you are able to create this marketing experience for your prospects and customers. You have to track the data, movement and actions of your prospects and customers and the types of devices they are using to determine how to create the best forms of digital integration.
Prospects and customers are using many types of devices to access service and product searches through search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. They connect to your products, services and business through desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile devices. So how do you integrate the user experience for them by way of Cross Channel Marketing?
Understand how you can target the same users through different parts of the engagement funnel. An engagement funnel is a part of the global marketing strategy. There are four main parts to the engagement funnel:
1. Awareness - Anyone can be a marketing prospect. Awareness is the top-level of the engagement funnel. Determine the type of content based on your business, services or products and bring awareness to the prospecting customers. This can be done with images, videos, podcasts, editorial and other types of content creation necessary to bring awareness to prospecting and current customers.
2. Consideration - Take into consideration how the prospect views your content and display of information in the awareness process. Understand how your platform and display are persuading your prospects and customers. Consideration is also a time where the prospect is making a decision and comparison of your products and information based on the visual displays.
3. Decision making and purchase - This is the place where follow-up and offers begin to make more sense. Now that your prospect is interested in what you have to offer, now it's time to intensify the interest with rich content. Think of why the customer should buy. This helps you understand the decision-making persuasion from the prospects viewpoint.
4. Post-purchase - This is the most challenging aspect of the engagement funnel more often than not. You have to understand the type of content that's necessary at least six to nine months in advance of the product purchase but you want the content to keep the prospect engaged with you. Send out a catchy newsletter to your prospects that have visited your site to keep them engaged for future purchase opportunities.
If you can answer the four main questions from the potential customers perspective, you're on the path to proper customer attraction and engagement in your marketing strategy: Why should I care? Why should I buy? Why should I buy now? What next?
Once you have the engagement funnel down, you can introduce the cross-channel marketing strategy. Adding promotional offers on periodic email marketing helps keep the prospect and current customers engaged with you while giving them other opportunities to purchase your services and goods. Remember to test every avenue by application. The options are endless to your marketing strategy.
