Three Crucial Factors Worth Keeping in Mind to Drive Multichannel Marketing Impact

Cross channel marketing programs help brands meet prospects and customers where they are. Doubling down on a multichannel or cross channel marketing program with the aim of driving more impact is often undertaken by measuring the different channels being used, to identify which ones work best for a brand based on where their prospects and customers are most active.

Understanding how each channel is performing allows marketers and advertisers to refocus efforts on the most promising channels. But constant measurement is just one part of the overall marketing game today.

In a marketplace where marketers are spoilt for choice when it comes to customer intelligence and data as well as the martech that can help drive marketing efforts, there are several other factors that marketing leaders should keep in mind.

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Multichannel marketing is an effective way to drive brand growth and messaging. But what can marketers do to ensure they get maximum impact from this strategy? Here are three factors to keep in mind:

What Are You Testing?

Testing every campaign and its outcome on each channel (viz: email, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc) can give marketers the ability to know whether the messaging being used is working or not, it can also help understand which channel works better than others.

However, without aligning a goal to each platform that is being used to drive a multichannel marketing initiative, marketers end up testing the wrong parameters.

If a brand’s marketing team, for instance, decides to have a strong email-LinkedIn-video-cold calling prospecting or marketing cycle, there should typically be a goal aligned to each of these.

This could look something like:

LinkedIn: 100 leads by the end of the month
Twitter: 50 leads by the end of the month

Testing campaigns to see how to scale them and what channel to double down on is one part of the cycle. Without aligning goals to the channels a brand is active on, the tests can lead to a jilted report. In many cases, marketers end up testing their campaigns across channels without these goals, which can lead to poor decision making. If the stats say that a particular campaign is giving less engagement on Twitter but seems to resonate on LinkedIn, this in itself is not a solid ground to reduce efforts on one of the channels.

Understanding what can be achieved through each channel and then dovetailing marketing messaging and campaigns according to those specific channels is what can help marketers scale and drive their business goals and ROI.

Being Clear About What Entails Wasted Marketing Spends

It is commonly understood that testing each campaign and channel whether it’s PPC, social, CTV, or any other medium can help reduce wasted dollars. It also helps marketers understand whether their campaigns are working to engage the right target audience.

While testing this aspect, many marketers will choose to lower marketing spend on channels that seem to show lower ROI than others. But this is where experienced marketing leaders need to have the right parameters in place to identify for themselves and their team as to what exactly entails wasted marketing spends.

For teams that have ad budgets to run paid ads or sponsored content programs through the year, experienced leaders at the helm will place goals in terms of lead quantity or revenue to evaluate whether it worked and whether they should repeat the campaign in the future.

Furthermore, lowering a spend on one channel based on just one campaign can actually lead to potential revenue loss. It is crucial to set a longer period of time for evaluation and also, evaluate a number of campaigns with different marketing messaging angles before taking realigning ad and marketing budgets.

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Forgetting to Rely on Real-time Data or Real-time Industry Insights

Your multichannel marketing efforts cannot be done away with in a time where every seasoned marketer will stress upon being where your audience is most active by using the right messaging at the right time.

But to ensure that these multichannel marketing initiatives are contributing to marketing and business growth goals, real-time industry changes and insights need to be part of the testing and evaluation process.

For instance: Elon Musk’s recent takeover of Twitter that led to layoffs and feature changes across the social media platform would also lead to changes in campaign performance on the network. Then there’s the growing usage of newer technologies like ChatGPT that inspire newer areas of interest for audiences across industries, leading to a drop in interest in other topics and interests for the time being.

Marketers who use real-time dynamics to understand how to measure their multichannel marketing will be able to make the right decisions as opposed to those who simply decide to drop a channel or campaign because of falling performance metrics.

The choice of martech and marketing channels today can seem daunting to lean teams but on the other hand, it allows marketers to experiment more. Multichannel marketing can also allow marketers to stay top of mind of their high value prospects and existing customers. Knowing what to measure and when are crucial to establishing a stronger foundation down the line so that it can lead to better changes in marketing execution and norms.