5 Must-Ask Questions to Optimize Your Cross Channel Marketing Strategy

Is your brand interacting with customers across multiple touchpoints in a customized and consistent manner? In other words, are you leveraging cross-channel marketing?

Traditional multi-channel marketing serves ads and content to customers across social media, emails, search, and other channels. While branding and messaging may be similar, all these touchpoints do not necessarily add up to a cohesive whole that drives purchases.

Cross-channel marketing takes multi-channel connections to the next level – every interaction encourages customers to move further on their unique buying journey, even when switching between channels. The average B2B buyer consumes 13 content pieces before purchasing. Cross-channel marketing is particularly powerful for content delivery across channels, especially in B2B marketing strategies. 

However, cross-channel marketing strategies are complex, and optimizing these campaigns can be challenging. This article explores cross-channel marketing strategies and tips to maximize success while minimizing campaign expenditure. 

What is a Cross-Channel Marketing Strategy?

A cross-channel marketing strategy combines customer interaction data from multiple channels to provide your target audience with an integrated and progressing customer journey. For example, let’s say a customer searching for a particular solution reads your blog on the topic. The next ad they see encourages them to share contact information and download a guide. Later, a marketing email lands in their inbox, with links to videos about how your product solves their problem and a form to book an appointment with sales.

This messaging consistency is critical in today’s world to establish customer trust. Customers are exposed to more advertisements than ever – anywhere between 4,000 to 10,000 adverts daily. Marketers must directly address customer needs and interests to capture attention and retain interest. 

An Accenture study found that 91% of consumers are likelier to purchase from brands that provide relevant recommendations. SmarterHQ’s study found that 72% of consumers only engage with personalized messaging. A cross-channel marketing strategy allows you to track customer information across channels to provide context for messaging and create cohesive and customized experiences for every customer.

However, building an effective cross-channel marketing strategy from scratch is difficult. It takes research, creativity, commitment, testing, and learning. Let’s begin with a hypothetical example of how a cross-channel marketing campaign works and then outline a few questions that will help you gauge the status of your current campaign.

How Cross-Channel Marketing Works

Consider how an average consumer may engage with a business that uses cross-channel marketing – take the Dollar Shave Club, for example. A consumer searching for “shaving tips for beginners” reads an online article that features a native ad offering a $5 limited-time trial on razors and grooming essentials from the Dollar Shave Club. Intrigued but cautious, the consumer scrolls past, unsure of the brand’s reputation.

Later in the day, they log onto social media and notice a targeted ad on Instagram from the same brand. This ad showcases testimonials from customers sharing how Dollar Shave Club products helped them when they began shaving – boosting the brand’s credibility in the consumer’s eyes. That evening, while streaming their favorite show on YouTube, another Dollar Shave Club ad appears, highlighting a slightly different offer and featuring a well-known influencer endorsing the brand. This time, the consumer clicks through to the website, reviews the details, and orders the trial.

After placing the order, the consumer receives a welcome email introducing the brand’s story and a personalized discount for their next purchase. Throughout their trial, they continue to receive carefully timed emails with product recommendations based on their initial choices. The consumer finally gains trust in the brand’s quality and subscribes to a recurring delivery service.

Of course, this idealized scenario shows only one path to success. Creating a seamless strategy that encourages action like this requires combining data, creatives, and marketing technology. 

Creating a cross-channel marketing strategy: Data is the key

Creating a cross-channel marketing strategy begins with aggregating diverse data points and building a unified view of the target audience. With this comprehensive data set, you can segment customers by demographics, behaviors, and preferences, and tailor messaging that resonates with distinct groups. 

Data also helps you identify the platforms where customers are most active, such as websites, mobile apps, social media channels, etc. Tailoring strategies for each channel, like using push notifications for website users or reels for social media, helps make this exposure more effective.

If you are new to cross-channel marketing, starting with micro funnels is a good idea. Smaller, focused campaigns, like addressing cart abandonment or retargeting (or remarketing to) site visitors, give you data to refine broader marketing funnels. Testing different types of journeys and channels will help you to find high-performing touchpoints. 

After identifying successful strategies, campaigns can be duplicated and adjusted for broader audiences. Remember to track metrics and refine strategies iteratively.

5 Questions for Your Cross-Channel Marketing Strategy

Putting a successful cross-channel marketing strategy in place has to start somewhere. With so many factors involved, it can be difficult to know exactly where. Asking these five questions will give you some clarity:

#1 What is my current marketing attribution technique?

Marketing attribution evaluates the different touchpoints on a customer’s path to purchase. What kind of attribution model is your organization using now? Last-touch attribution? Multi-touch attribution? Time decay? Or something else entirely? Cross-channel campaigns must be backed by industry-leading attribution strategies that provide the most granular reach and engagement data possible. 

The best measurement and attribution models identify exactly which consumer groups are viewing and engaging with your advertisements and break down exactly which ad they viewed, where it was displayed, and when they saw it. They can also present data as both aggregate and person-level measurements, with aggregate data informing general consumer trends, while person-level data helps you deeply understand a narrow segment of consumers.

You also want to incorporate data from offline channels. While it can be difficult, methods like unified marketing measurement allow you to match engagements with ad exposure data (geotagging, zip code data, or in-store purchases within a certain geography) to help trace a customer’s path on their cross-channel journey.

#2 What types of consumer data am I analyzing?

Effective cross-channel marketing needs to access data that uncovers when individuals were exposed to a certain ad and who they were. This is not a one-and-done procedure, either – it must be replicated for each microsegment of your consumer base. Some of this information is found by collecting data from your campaigns, but more comprehensive information often lies in third-party sources.  

However, for the best campaign possible, marketers should access data from organizations that produce a large amount of consumer data. Platforms like Nielsen, Oracle BlueKai, Adobe, Neustar, LiveRamp, and others give you deeper insights into consumption habits in the current, complex multi-device, multi-platform, and multi-distribution landscape. 

Purchase this data either directly from the source or from a reputable partner with close relationships with these companies and the ability to answer in-depth questions regarding the quality of the data.

#3 Is my data high quality?

Only 44% of marketers feel their target audience data is high quality. Unreliable data often causes marketers to overspend, craft the wrong messaging, or even lead their entire campaigns astray. You can take a few steps to ensure your data is up to date. 

• Create a standard methodology for analysis that highlights any outliers or missing data as their first line of defense against clearly unreliable information.
• Create standard data templates. The better the data intake, the faster and more accurate your marketing analysis.
• Set up a schedule for data audits and use tools that automatically check data for inconsistencies.
• Establish real-time data integration where possible to ensure your customer data reflects the latest behaviors and trends.

#4 Am I prioritizing the right marketing channels?

Marketers should prioritize the channels that give them the most reach within their target market instead of following gut feelings based on competitor actions. For example, you may believe that marketing your products on TikTok will help you capture a younger demographic – but if you’re seeing that TikTok exposures scarcely lead to future engagements, it would be better to continue using tried-and-true channels.

Look at which exposures make up the customer’s journey, especially if specific pathways directly lead to sales. Try to work within this framework, occasionally running smaller campaigns that mix and match potential pieces of the customer’s journey to test uncharted waters. At the end of the day, always put the bulk of your budget into what already works.

#5 Can I access technology designed for cross-channel campaigns?

To unify marketing measurements into a single, cross-channel strategy, marketers need a data analytics platform capable of organizing and analyzing big data. You should look for technology that helps you analyze data promptly and provide “what-if” scenarios to estimate budgets and results. 

Consider investing in a Demand-Side Platform (DSP) like Outbrain to automate buying digital ad inventory across multiple channels, such as websites, mobile apps, and video platforms. You can automatically reach new audiences similar to your top existing customers, target based on interest, and auto-optimize bids from a single place.

You can also use Outbrain to run contextual native advertising on the open web. Contextual advertising targets viewers based on the context of the webpage on which the ads are featured. For example, Dollar Shave Club ads appear with an article on shaving in the New York Times, increasing brand credibility and customer trust.

Final Thoughts

As you continue crafting your cross-channel campaigns, understand that constant optimization is necessary. Keep an eye out for the channels that your target audience is active in and constantly collect data about their behavior. Analyze this data to understand exactly what encourages these customers to react. Once a campaign has been launched, continuously refine it with the feedback you collect from customers – and bring it back to market with more powerful messaging.

A holistic cross-channel marketing strategy doesn’t only help you increase exposure – it also gives you a complete view of how customers interact with marketing messages. Maximizing the value of your media placements based on data-driven insights of consumer motivators leads to increased revenue and improved marketing ROI.

FAQ

What is the difference between cross-channel and multichannel marketing?  

Multichannel marketing uses multiple, separate channels (e.g., email, social media, in-store) to reach customers, but they may not be integrated. Cross-channel marketing connects these channels so customers can move between them seamlessly and progressively, creating a unified experience.

What is the difference between cross-channel and omnichannel marketing?  

Cross-channel marketing integrates selected channels for a seamless customer journey across those points. Omnichannel marketing goes further by aligning all available online and offline channels into one cohesive experience. It combines past customer purchases, brand interactions, and present interests for consistent messaging. The customer is “known” at all touchpoints, and all purchase recommendations are customized to best fit the individual.

What are the benefits of cross-channel marketing?  

Cross-channel marketing improves customer engagement and increases conversion rates by creating a progressing experience with the brand across touchpoints. It builds brand recognition in the context of current customer interests and challenges. You can track customer behavior across channels for personalized advertising and better campaign ROI.

What are some cross-channel marketing examples?  

All cross-channel marketing strategies integrate customer data across channels for a seamless journey. Examples include retargeting website visitors with native ads, using QR codes in offline ads to drive online purchases, or sending abandoned cart emails with exclusive offers to encourage conversions.