A channel is any route your business can take to reach a customer. This includes:
● Your Website
● Direct Mail
● Emails
● Social Media
● PPC advertising
● Online Catalogs
● Print Advertising
● Radio and Television
● Mobile Marketing
● Apps
To create an intelligent marketing plan, you’ve got to consider every reasonable channel. You must also remember that most customers won’t stick with just one channel. This is why there must be consistency and coordination in your efforts from one channel to the next.
One element that can be used to support this is digital content. There are several ways that content creation and promotion can be used to aid in your cross-channel marketing campaigns. These methods, combined with marketing automation can provide a powerhouse solution to getting the right content to the right customers at the precise moment they need it.
Embrace Cross Channel Automation Platforms
It’s challenging and time-consuming to manage cross-channel marketing campaigns effectively. Fortunately, these processes can be centralized and simplified with a marketing automation platform like WebEngage. You can manage personalization, workflow, segmentation, and analysis all from a single dashboard. By adopting automation here, you free your team to provide in-person engagement where it benefits campaigns most.
Embrace the Non-Linear Customer Journey
Think about your upcoming holiday shopping. Unless you’ve embraced extreme minimalism, you’ve got presents to buy, food supplies to stock, perhaps even travel plans to formulate. Throughout this process, you’re going to:
● Engage with several different brands
● Interact with many of these brands through different channels
● Need information at each point along the way
Veronica Wright, Head of marketing at ResumesCentre explains, “There are so many different ways that you might engage with a brand before you decide to make a purchase, and before you actually do make that purchase. Your customers likely interact with your brand the same day. A customer might see a post of yours on Facebook because they meet some targeting criteria. Later, they browse through your brick and mortar store as they go through a shopping center, and see a few things that interest them. Then they visit your website to look up some more information on those products.”
Collect and Provide Information across Multiple Channels
This nonlinear journey is becoming the norm. At first thought, this can be overwhelming. How do you manage the user experience when it’s so unpredictable? On the other hand, all of this creates so many opportunities to create engagement and provide customers with the information they need at every point in the journey. There’s also more opportunity to gather the information you need to personalize content for each touch point. You can then use this information to deliver actionable updates and notifications to your customers through a platform such as Get Beamer. This type of customer engagement is highly efficient when it comes to increasing your customer retention and content delivery automation as a whole.
Google has begun to embrace this through multi-device tracking. Imagine a customer accessing your website via mobile, engaging with your social media on their laptop, and clicking on your landing page in their home or office using their desktop. Previously, analytics would treat each of those actions as completely separate sessions. Now, tracking can be done at the user level. This allows you to learn more about the ways users are engaging with you across multiple channels and using multiple devices.
The more you learn, the more accurately you can predict the information that people need during their journey and what they are looking for depending on the channel or device they’re using.
Think of Content as Part of the Experience
Natalie Andersen is a digital marketer and co-founder of GetGoodGrade.com who understands the impact that content can have on the user experience. She says, “We’ve learned that our customers want and need different things from us at different points in their journey. If we can deliver what they need in a way that’s useful and unobtrusive, we’ve created a happier customer. No matter where they come into contact with us, it’s up to us to determine why they are there and what we can do to make a better experience.”
90% of customers use their phones in stores. REI recognized that customers were using their devices to make their shopping experiences better. So, they decided to provide them with free Wi-Fi to enable their efforts. Then, they took it a step further by providing associates with mobile devices as well. This meant that employees could help customers on the floor, at the moment, without having to head to the back of the store to get the information they needed.
Grocery stores and other retailers use beacon technology, kiosks, and mobile devices to deliver very specific content to customers in the store automatically. For example, a customer in the seafood section might be a bit overwhelmed at the selection of fresh fish, especially if they aren’t experienced in cooking it. But, a kiosk could provide them with cooking tips and the chance to sign up for more tips via email. If the same customers have an app installed that allows the store to collect data on their preferences and order history, they can further personalize the content they deliver. When it comes to content automation planning and delivery, there are several steps worth keeping in mind throughout the process:
- Content ideation is an important part of customer engagement since it dictates the quality of what you deliver to your audiences. Make sure that you have a clear content plan outlined for upcoming automated delivery in order to keep up with your reputation as a professional content provider.
- Engagement analysis is also worth exploring once your content is delivered to the right customers. Tools such as Google Analytics or Mail Chimp can be highly effective at analyzing the performance of your content delivery campaigns. Make sure to understand what works and doesn’t work for your audience in order to iterate on an ongoing basis.
- Customer outreach can also give you a lot of actionable data to implement in upcoming content delivery campaigns. You can reach out to satisfied customers with surveys and polls made with platforms such as Google Forms in regards to their experience with your automated content delivery. Find out how customers perceive your automation efforts and shift your strategy around in order to find a balance that works for both parties.
Back online, those customers can be targeted with email newsletters personalized based upon the preferences they selected when they signed up. The key, of course, is making that content valuable enough that readers feel it was worthwhile to subscribe. This is where you might consider using professional services, resources, and tools to create polished and highly visual content such as FlashEssay, PiktoChart, Essay Supply, or Hemingway App.
Final Thoughts
Digital content is information, delivered to your audience electronically. Cross-channel marketing creates several points at which you can use this content to improve experiences and engage your target audience. Make sure you use every possible channel to reach your target audience and offer them personalized approach and timely services.
About the author: Jessica Fender is a marketing consultant, blogger, and pro writer at Onlinewritersrating. She is focused on creating innovative and customer-friendly strategies for business growth. Featured on Freelancer.com and Addicted2Success. You can follow Jessica on Twitter @fender_jess to never miss her next post.
