Multi-Channel Marketing, Their Challenges And How To Avoid Them

It doesn’t matter what product or service you’re selling, multi-channel marketing offers a high return on investment. It goes without saying that if you’re not sharing your message to multiple channels, you’re missing a large portion of your audience and you don’t want to do that. Reaching more of your audience translates into higher profits.

However, along with these profitable opportunities comes challenges. In order to use them to your advantage, here are some tips you can implement to avoid them.

Keep Your Message Consistent
It’s tempting when moving to a new channel for marketing to change your entire personality. However, you actually want to keep your message consistent, no matter what channel you’re sending the message.

Make Your Branding Cohesive
Think about brands that you know. Taco Bell, McDonalds, Nike – all of these are recognizable brands, regardless of where we see them. When you see a swoosh, you know it’s Nike even without the tagline.

Choosing the Right Channels
Your audience is not everywhere, but you should be where your audience is. You’ll need to understand who your audience is and where they ‘hang out’ so you can target your marketing messages.

Understand Your Audience on the Various Channels
While your audience doesn’t change completely based on the channel they’re using, the way you talk to them might change a little. By that it’s meant that your message is the same, but how you say it may be different.

Twitter requires you to use 280 characters, while on TV you might have 30 seconds, for instance. Naturally, this will require a different approach to deliver the same message. So knowing who you’re talking to and where you’re talking to them matters.

Create a Customer-Centric Voice
You’ve heard a lot about finding your voice, the truth is, you already have a voice; the voice you need to find is your customers’ voice, and design your message for them to hear.  What do they want to know? What is it about them that makes your product work for them? It’s never about you; it’s always about them.

Keep the Experience Consistent
The other challenge with multi-channel marketing is ensuring that for those of your audience who see your message on different channels, or visit you from different channels, that they have a consistent experience.  If not, it will be confusing if they’re not sure who you are, or understand how your product can help them.

Understand the Metrics
Each channel has different metrics that are important and different methods for which to analyze them. Click-through rates on your website to your sales page are counted using different software than click-through rates within your newsletter. You need to understand how it all works and ties together and what it means, as well as which numbers you want to test.

The Sum of all Parts
Every channel works together, as well as independently. Each should stand alone, yet be integrated as well. So, continually test every aspect of your multichannel marketing effort. Understand the results, because success or failure comes down to the numbers.

© Cherry-Ann Carew

Cherry-Ann Carew is an Online Business Strategist & Amazon multi-bestselling author. She supports emerging business owners simplify their start-up journey, by customizing a business framework that aligns with their vision and goals, so that they can earn uncapped income and live life on their terms.