Last week, we kicked off a two-part series on developing a winning multichannel marketing strategy to ensure your brand stands out to customers in the crowded, ever-changing marketplace. Part 1 focused on empowering your marketing team, identifying your target audience, and understanding what you’re trying to accomplish – whether repeat visits or purchases, attracting new clients in a particular geography, or launching a new product, service, or offer.
Today, we’re rounding out the strategy series with insights on creating and launching campaigns designed to help you reach your goals.
Let’s dive in.
Build Valuable Assets for Every Channel
Once you’ve identified your target personas and what you’re hoping to get them to do, it’s time to determined how to best communicate your message and to build the vehicles that will deliver it. These will include a variety of assets including text and graphics for online and traditional channels: social media posts, paid advertising, ebooks and infographics, direct mail postcards, point of sale (POS) kits and store signage, for starters. What ties these disparate pieces of collateral together? They’re all created with your unique solutions to your target audience’s most pressing problems in mind.
As you develop these assets, it’s critical to ensure the messaging and design are clear and consistent from piece to piece and channel to channel, from the solutions you’re offering to the best way to buy. Inconsistent or incompatible information and branding is liable to harm your business’s credibility. Why? Customers expect their interactions with brands to be seamless across every channel, and according to Salesforce, if customers’ branding expectations aren’t met, 73 percent say they’ll take their business elsewhere.
Of course, maintaining consistency and brand integrity can be difficult when there are multiple marketers creating collateral — especially when those marketers are spread across the country and creating material to entice their own local audiences. So how can national marketers protect brand integrity without having to spend all their time micromanaging their teams? The key is to centralize assets with a brand management platform to ensure every local leader has access to the latest approved marketing assets and templates and the power to localize, then order printed material as needed — without busting the budget, compromising the brand, or requiring hand-holding every step of the way.
Build and Launch Multichannel Marketing Campaigns
Once the assets are ready to go, the next step is to build them into multichannel campaigns that ensure your target audience will encounter your messaging across several platforms, both online and off, and have all the information (and inspiration) they need to make a purchase.
The most effective campaigns are directed toward a specific audience persona and come with a specific call to action. For example:
- A healthcare organization might create a campaign introducing new therapies to existing patients in a certain age group.
- A home improvement brand might target first-time homebuyers with a campaign about preventative maintenance.
- A financial services company might showcase their latest security enhancements to entice customers to enroll in online banking.
These campaigns also distribute their messages via a variety of print and digital channels to ensure customers and potential customers encounter them repeatedly. To that end, you’ll want to set up several different outreach strategies, including the following:
- Social media posts
- Targeted online advertising
- E-mail nurture series
- Direct mail or every door direct mail
- Standard and grand format signage
- Instore point of sale kits / displays
Together, these disparate outreach methods create a cohesive campaign that, if done right, will capture your target audience’s attention and encourage them to respond to your call-to-action. Each piece can be managed in-house or outsourced to individual vendors. But for the sake of efficiency, consistency, and quality control, we recommend working with a single-source vendor that can help you manage every leg of the campaign, every step of the way.
Analyze Results and Adjust as Needed
Finally, while successful marketing campaigns may seem like magic, the reality is that they require careful monitoring to ensure that every investment is paying off as it should. As your campaigns take off, make it a priority to analyze their progress against the key metrics that are most important to your organization — clicks on social media ads, ebook downloads, direct mail response rates, new product sales, etc. If the numbers are hitting where you want them to, that’s fantastic! Now, you can simply rinse and repeat. If you’re not hitting those goal metrics, on the other hand, consistent reporting and analysis will allow you to catch shortfalls and make changes before wasting additional budget on ineffective outreach.
While this analysis can also be done manually if necessary, businesses can achieve in-depth insights much more quickly and regularly with a reporting partner that integrates with other third-party systems to track key information about every campaign.
Developing a multichannel marketing strategy can feel like quite the juggling act, but the six steps we’ve covered in this series will serve as a guide to putting your best brand foot forward every time. And at OneTouchPoint, we’re here to help. We pride ourselves on supporting organizations across a wide variety of industries as they develop and execute multichannel marketing campaigns to build brand awareness, drive sales, and enhance the bottom line.