Kenyon Blunt
Regardless of your company’s sophistication, there are six key steps that have to occur in order to successfully implement multichannel campaigns. The challenges of multichannel marketing are many, but will have far reaching implications once they’re overcome. Here are the prerequisites that I see:
- Shift your focus from offline to online channels. Many companies have effectively used targeted offline channels such as direct mail and telemarketing. A good place to start is by learning the best practices of email marketing and experimenting with social media.
- Educate your employees on new digital marketing opportunities. Your employees are probably active users of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Educate them about how these channels can be used for marketing and what they can do to help.
- Take one campaign and implement it across multiple channels. Experiment with one campaign where you deliver a consistent message using two or three channels. Set it up so you can demonstrate the value of cross-channel marketing efforts.
- Develop a consistent theme and brand. Just like all your other marketing efforts, a consistent theme and brand image will improve your marketing. It becomes even more important as more channels are involved.
- Improve marketing analytics by aggregating data to a centralized database. As I’ve noted in previous blogs, the most challenging aspect of multichannel marketing is disparate data systems. While not easy, multichannel marketing requires a centralized database in order to measure and optimize multichannel campaigns.
- Measure marketing performance across channels. Next to the challenges of integrating online and offline data, measuring marketing performance is the next hardest obstacle to overcome. To have the success in marketing analytics that we’re used to in the offline world, this has to be a high priority in designing multichannel campaigns.
All marketers recognize the importance of multichannel marketing. We just need to overcome some difficult obstacles and begin experimenting with cross-channel campaigns.
About the Author:
Kenyon Blunt is the CEO at SIGMA Marketing Group. Connect with Kenyon on or follow him on .
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Educating employees can’t be stressed enough. The fact is, employees are going to use social media while on the job. Why not encourage it, and even USE that fact to one’s own advantage.
Good stuff. THanks for the tips!