The Strategy Guide to Multichannel Content Marketing

Guy Sheetrit

2 months ago

Why use a multichannel content marketing approach?

Think of your favorite Netflix show. You expect each series to flow, right? If new characters suddenly appear who have nothing to do with the plot and things go off on different tangents, it would quickly get confusing.

The same applies to content marketing. If your website, blog, social media, YouTube, and any other channel you use don’t join up in messaging and style, then you’re going to confuse potential customers.

Confusion isn’t a strong selling point. Marketing works better when it’s unified and makes sense.

That’s what multichannel content marketing is – an integrated strategy where you put content out with consistent messaging across multiple channels.

In the digital age, that adds up to a lot of channels. Recent research shows the average person uses more than 6 social media platforms per month. A website blog is another channel. Maybe you’ve got a YouTube channel too. And don’t forget old-school display ads or native ads. People still read email, so that’s another channel to consider. Out-of-home (OOH) advertising is yet another channel. The list goes on!

With 72% of people saying they prefer brands that use multiple content channels, it’s clear that if you want to meet customer expectations, you need a joined-up strategy to deal with them all.

What is Multichannel Content Marketing?

Multichannel content marketing involves marketing across different platforms in order to have a wider reach of (prospective) customers. Instead of relying on one medium to communicate with the public, multichannel marketing means you are spreading out your efforts to interact with more people. In essence, multichannel marketing is being everywhere at once.

Multichannel marketing increases awareness of your brand. Most people require five to seven impressions to remember a brand. Therefore, utilizing multiple platforms would make your brand more popular. This would subsequently increase conversion.

In fact, research shows that using two or more marketing channels for a single campaign can increase engagement by 166% or more compared to just one.

A multichannel marketing success story that’s as good as a hot cup of coffee

The primary aim of any marketing strategy or campaign is to drive sales. Marketing departments are always on the lookout for new methods that can help the company to close more. It seems a popular coffee retailer, Starbucks, hit the jackpot.

Starbucks introduced its rewards app to give loyal customers free rewards in a smart card, which they can then use to buy coffee at the store. But they’ve been able to do even more with that. For instance, if you don’t like standing in line at the store, you can pre-order coffee wherever you are. Users can also identify outlets close to them and view menu additions, among other things.

And you can do all this on your phone, on the app, or on your PC through Starbucks’ website. Your information remains the same across the board. By providing such a seamless experience for buying coffee, Starbucks recorded up to 30% of sales through the app with adoption exceeding 20 million customers.

Multichannel or Omnichannel?

It’s important to clearly define the difference between multichannel and omnichannel marketing. Both terms are thrown around these days and it’s so easy to confuse them. Omnichannel marketing is a multichannel marketing approach, rather than something else entirely. ClickZ makes the distinction as follows.

Multichannel marketing: When a brand reaches out on several channels with the same message in the hope of reaching as many customers as possible.

Omnichannel marketing: When a brand sends messages to a customer across channels that interact with each other and with the customer, responding to customer needs throughout.

Omnichannel marketing challenges everything that is wrong with traditional multichannel marketing, such as focusing more on channels than customers and lack of cross-platform integration. The result is a new approach that is still multichannel, but gives better results.

Source

Types of Marketing Channels

Before we look at specific marketing channels, let’s break it down into two main categories – traditional marketing channels (offline) and digital marketing channels (online).

Both are effective, some more so than others when targeting certain demographics. So we’ll identify possible channels for each and how to build them into a multichannel marketing strategy.

Traditional offline marketing channels

Print ads: Print newspapers and magazines aren’t as popular as they used to be, but they’re still going strong, especially with older generations. To integrate print ads with a multichannel marketing approach, you can include URLs or QR codes.
Radio ads: Radio is still a powerful medium, especially in areas where people commute to and from work by car or where there is limited internet access. Radio ads can sync with online campaigns by aligning the timing of both and mentioning social media promos in the radio spots.
TV ads: Television ads have a broad reach, especially during prime-time viewing hours. Use similar visuals and taglines for your TV ads as other platforms. Include CTAs that direct viewers to interact with your brand online.
Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising: Billboards are great for brand building or to keep your brand top of mind. They are often seen by a wide demographic and can link with digital strategies by choosing locations with high smartphone usage.

Digital marketing channels

Native advertising: Leverage native advertising to target audiences when they spend their time on the open web. The open web is all the publisher sites outside of the closed ecosystems of social media and search engines. For example, news, entertainment, and sports websites offer native ad placements where businesses can promote landing pages or other content links to their audiences while browsing online, driving traffic and engagement.
Social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (X), etc. allow for highly targeted ads based on user data. You can integrate with other channels by driving traffic to your website. Use retargeting ads to capture the attention of users who engaged elsewhere.
Email marketing: Email is a direct way to engage people. You can personalize email messages to fit user interests and behaviors. You can also promote web content or invite people to connect on social media in your emails.
Content marketing: Blogs, videos, ebooks, and infographics are all part of a good content marketing strategy. Link up with native ad campaigns or social media pages to drive traffic to your content.
SEO and search marketing: Optimize your content for search engines to increase traffic. You can boost results with pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns too.

How to Create a Multichannel Content Marketing Campaign?

Creating a multichannel content marketing campaign might seem overwhelming at first. If you’re already publishing ads and content through lots of different channels, trying to join everything up is a big task.

As with any marketing strategy, the secret to success is to break it up into small chunks and plan carefully. We’ve set out some simple steps below to help plan and launch a multichannel marketing campaign that resonates with your audience.

Step 1 – Clarify your vision

What do you hope to achieve with your multichannel content marketing? Increase brand awareness, boost sales, drive more traffic to your store, improve customer loyalty?

Step 2 – Set measurable goals

The “measurable” bit of this step is what people often neglect. Goals need to be specific and measurable or you won’t be able to define success. For example, a good goal could be to “increase website traffic from native advertising by 10% over the next quarter through Outbrain native video campaigns.”

Step 3 – Know your audience

Gather as much data as possible on demographics, interests, preferences, etc. Use these insights to tailor your content.

Step 4 – Pick your channels carefully

Choose channels that make the most impact. Don’t pick every channel – focus on areas that your audience frequents the most. For instance, if your target market spends a lot of time reading blogs, don’t waste time making videos.

Step 5 – Create content that cuts through the noise

The online space is overcrowded. That’s why you have to create content that hits the right notes in terms of style, tone, format, and value. Make it personalized to your audience with content that helps them in some way – either to overcome problems or entertain and enlighten them.

Step 6 – Integrate and coordinate channels

Build a unified brand experience with tools that schedule posts or software to manage multiple channels in one place.

Step 7 – Use automation and personalization tools

Try to automate as much of the process as possible, without losing the personal touch. By automating campaign scheduling or ad bidding and buying wherever possible, you can increase productivity, leaving more time for A/B testing or other tactics to boost results.

Step 8 – Monitor, measure, and make adjustments

Once your multichannel content marketing campaign is up and running, make sure you measure results against your goals. If you find certain channels are outperforming others, then focus your resources more heavily on them. Monitor performance metrics like engagement rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and ROI.

Implementing your Multichannel Content Marketing Strategy

Starting a multichannel marketing strategy can be challenging for small B2B and B2C and also larger companies. Since you are trying to establish a consistent presence across various platforms, you need to invest more resources and plan more carefully. Creating a multichannel marketing strategy is not as simple as just uploading content on any available platform; it has to be systematic.

Therefore, note the following points about how to create a good multichannel content marketing strategy:

Set specific goals: This is the obvious first step. You need to know what exactly you are working towards. Do you want more revenue from sales, sign-ups, or website traffic? How would you measure and attribute success? Only by determining these will you be able to properly plan how to achieve it.
Be customer-centered: The aim of a multichannel strategy is to reach customers wherever they are. You might as well personalize the experience to generate better interaction. Creating buyer personas can help you understand your ideal customers and how to target them.

Case in point: Netflix did not increase its subscriber base from 21.5 million in 2011 to 148.86 million in 2019 through pure luck. Personalization was instrumental to their success. It’s often said that no two Netflix homepages are the same. Netflix owes that to its powerful algorithms that monitor what users watch and give recommendations based on that.

Be consistent: Don’t simply splash content across different platforms. Ensure the message, design and presentation are consistent everywhere. This approach helped Starbucks execute their plan successfully, as described above. By creating an experience that was the same on the app, website and offline, they were able to get more active customers and close more sales. In fact, going by a study conducted by the New Jersey Institute of Technology, 90% of customers prefer seamless cross-platform integration of brand marketing.
Collect useful data: In establishing your strategy, monitor the journey of each user right to the point of becoming a customer. This helps you know which methods work and which don’t and why. Take your cue from Birchbox, a beauty e-commerce company. After opening a retail store in New York, they released a companion app for customers. While shopping, the Birchbox app sends notifications of special deals to customers’ devices. But apart from that, the app also monitors and collects data on customers’ purchasing habits, visits, etc. This data can then be used to send more personalized information later on.
Use automation: One of the main challenges businesses face with multichannel marketing is its complexity. One way around this is by automating simple tasks, such as scheduling campaigns or generating titles for ads. Use automation apps like Buffer, Hootsuite, Zapier, etc, as well as AI and automation tools offered by ad platforms like Outbrain.

Case in point: Groove is a SaaS company that sends customer onboarding emails to new users to familiarize them with their product. The aim is to get them to subscribe. Where it gets interesting is that if the system notices a particular user struggling with a task, it automatically sends an email to them, offering help. Results? 10% higher response rate, plus 30% of customers retained.

Takeaways

To increase your brand awareness, you must invest resources in a multichannel content marketing strategy.
The beauty of multichannel marketing is seamless integration across platforms.
The best time to create a multichannel marketing strategy was before you read this article; the next best time to do so is right away.