Multichannel digital marketing (MDM) is a necessity for the modern marketer. With enhanced access to information, today’s consumers are intelligent and diversified. MDM is an expression of the understanding of where your target market is and how they want to be spoken to. Simply put, this type of strategy can prove to your consumer base that you know and understand them. While emphasizing front-end research, a multi-variant content-focused marketing strategy is necessary for expanding brand awareness and connecting with your target audience in ways that fit their unique needs and preferences.

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Understanding Your Audience

“You can build a beautiful car, but if you stick it in a forest, no one will ever see it.” The most important part of running a successful MDM campaign is knowing where your audience is spending their time. Front end research is vital to understanding how people view your brand and how they want to be interacted with. The channels you choose to include in your campaign should be popular among your target audience. Once you’ve identified the channels where your audience is spending their time, you can develop a meaningful brand voice, creating consistent and identifiable messaging across all of your various marketing channels. Strategically choosing the correct channels and appropriate messaging will help boost brand awareness.

A multichannel approach also helps take into account that attention spans and consumer behavior will vary according to platform. For example, some platforms will warrant different visuals due to the nature of “constant scrolling.” In other places providing closed captions helps reach audience members that may be hard of hearing or enable audiences to consume content in spaces where playing audio may be inappropriate. Similarly, creating carousel posts might enable audience members to spend more time on a post as opposed to simply liking it. Knowing how to prompt call-to-action according to the parameters of specific platforms can allow for more engagements whether that’s hitting ‘play’ on a video, sharing to a feed or stories, or commenting directly. MDM allows your brand to be accessible in ways that meet the needs of every individual.

Patience Ensures Longevity

While the desire might be for instant gratification, thorough and effective marketing and brand-building takes time as well as some trial and error. Analytics should be a major component in your multichannel marketing strategy. Consistent reporting throughout a campaign will be crucial for adapting and responding to the behavior of a target audience. Completion of a campaign should include another audit: looking at the macro perspective and altering the strategy accordingly. When you know which channels are strong, you can improve your strategy. More so, running multiple channels within marketing allows you to constantly test new ideas and take risks, as you don’t have to rely solely on one channel to deliver results.

Creating a Sustainable Brand Image

When it comes to a multichannel strategy, benefit and necessity are one in the same. Today more than ever, brands are experiencing a heightened sense of accountability. Integral to this is a brand’s reputation and an emphasis on nurturing the thoughts and feelings of a target audience. Brands have more responsibility to make an audience believe in their values and shared ideals. This is where a well-executed multichannel strategy serves consumers — giving them the content they want in the ways in which they want it. Furthermore, MDM can serve brand sustainability. Using multiple channels in a marketing strategy is a good way to cope with constant changes in the digital media landscape; if one channel is stagnant from a technical advancement or change, there is a back-up plan in place to ensure targets are met. Consistent reporting and reevaluation of the multichannel strategy will also ensure longevity of a brand, keeping you connected to your audience and constantly evolving to stay relevant with consumers.

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