Email, social media, affiliate ads, SMS—your brand appears in multiple channels daily. If you have scattered messaging, whether due to fractured marketing funnels or data silos, it can confuse and alienate customers.
Cross-channel marketing promises to correct these problems, effectively giving your audience the information and assurance they need without direct brand interaction.
Of course, if you want to implement cross-channel principles, you first have to lay the groundwork. Here, we explore how cross-channel marketing works and why it’s important to embrace.
What is cross-channel marketing?
Cross-channel marketing is the integration of consistent messaging across all marketing channels. Whether you’re sending an email or retargeting an ad, a cross-channel approach helps marketers narrow down what they want to say and how they want to say it.
Marketers gather and leverage metrics to tailor content based on the consumer. Channels may interact with one another, and marketers may use cross-device attribution to ensure a better customer experience. For instance, you might post a product on social media before emailing a discount code to an audience segment the next day.
Ideally, cross-channel marketing accounts for the funnel stage. So, if a customer simply clicked on a product landing page for a pair of jeans, the retargeted ad would differ from that of another customer who heavily interacted with the customization tools (such as selecting size, cut, and color).
In today’s crowded digital marketing landscape, cross-channel marketing helps you adjust your messaging to all customers, making the journey more cohesive across all platforms. The future of cross-channel marketing will likely see the complete evaporation of all data silos, thanks to the ongoing investments in cloud data warehouses.
Cross-channel vs. multichannel vs. omnichannel: What’s the difference?
As the number of marketing platforms has increased, the terminology surrounding them has changed, too:
- Multichannel marketing: A multi-channel marketing campaign uses multiple channels to market to customers. For instance, you might offer a service via in-store posters, the company website, and social media.
- Cross-channel marketing: Cross-channel marketing unites platforms to provide a more seamless experience for the customer, streamlining messaging and improving overall engagement. You might draw information from different sources so communication is consistent across the board.
- Omnichannel marketing: Omnichannel marketing refers to a full representation of the brand across both online and offline channels.
Cross-channel marketing draws elements from both multichannel and omnichannel marketing, at times making it somewhat confusing to differentiate. The main difference is that cross-channel marketing focuses on integrated messaging and strategies for better marketing ROI (return on investment), regardless of the platform.
Common challenges for marketers without cross-channel campaigns
Failing to integrate cross-channel campaigns can lead to some common marketing pitfalls for customers and potential customers alike.
Inefficient resource usage
Disjointed marketing efforts are a waste of money, time, and your workforce’s energy. Marketers may exert tremendous effort in advertising to people with little interest in their company. With cross-channel marketing, a company stands a better chance of conserving resources.
Inconsistent messaging
Your customers don’t have time to decipher what a brand says versus what it means. Inconsistent messaging not only confuses customers but can also weaken trust, brand recognition, and overall retention.
Poor customer experience
Every customer has expectations about a brand experience. Without cross-channel efforts, you can frustrate even the most forgiving customers. For example, say your social media channels are promoting a sale on a certain item. However, your in-store employees don’t know anything about the sale. This can create friction and distrust for customers who arrive at the store expecting the social media promotion to be honored. Marketers can end up destroying the already fragile bonds of loyalty rather than building them.
The most important components of a cross-channel marketing strategy
Cross-channel marketing starts with a robust framework. We’ll look at how to integrate various elements to develop your strategy for a better user experience.
Unified customer view
If you don’t have a basic understanding of the customer, your messaging can easily appear incoherent to your target audience. With cross-channel marketing, you can integrate data from different sources to deliver personalized messages.
For instance, let’s say you’re dealing with an audience segment that purchases once and then never returns. With cross-channel marketing, you can pull information from the original purchase to send emails with exclusive discounts or personalized appeals for feedback about their experience with the product. A unified customer view ensures you don’t email one-time customers to thank them for “long-term loyalty.”
Consistent brand messaging
Your customer doesn’t have much time to devote to your brand. Most marketers are lucky if they can enforce one brand value, let alone two or three. Whether you distinguish your products and services by price, quality, or convenience, you want your brand messaging to reflect their value across all channels.
Concentrating on your brand messaging is the key to reinforcing your brand’s identity and building customer trust. The tracking links, website design, displays, and so on should all represent the core theme of the marketing campaign so there’s no confusion. You want customers to quickly identify the offer and call to action so they can make faster, more confident decisions.
One way to reinforce your branding throughout your cross-channel marketing strategy is to incorporate it into even the most granular aspects of your content. Custom short URLs and QR Codes that reflect your brand’s domain, colors, and logo are a great way to build trust and keep your content consistent and on brand—no matter where it appears.
Integrated marketing channels
Every channel is a chance to connect with your customers. If you don’t integrate these channels, though, they risk contradicting one another. When you use Bitly campaigns, you can weave all channels into your campaigns, complementing and reinforcing your messaging to create better customer journeys.
With cross-channel marketing, you don’t have to ignore the inherent differences between platforms. For instance, if your younger customer demographic is on Instagram and your older demographic is on Facebook, you can still tailor the messaging for different age groups.
Integration is a major stumbling block for companies today, particularly for e-commerce businesses. While many customers want an integrated shopping experience, few truly get it. Cross-channel efforts encourage brands to keep their language, content, and offerings consistent so there’s an easily identifiable thread for all customers.
Data-driven decisions
Big data has touted data analytics as the answer to nearly every question. When you apply it to cross-channel marketing, the goal is to harness information from all channels to understand customer behavior and needs better.
So, if one channel is vastly outperforming the others, you can use analytics to determine what’s driving interest in one channel and what’s falling short with the others. You can also collect individual data from customers to better determine where they are in the buyer journey and how best to appeal to their sensibilities.
Continuous optimization
Cross-channel marketers must continually test, learn, and optimize to adapt to new customer preferences and marketing dynamics. This doesn’t necessarily mean switching up your brand values but positioning them so they hit home with your audience.
Marketers should implement this component for both short- and long-term success. For instance, let’s say that a significant portion of your audience misinterprets a post on a social media platform. A good continuous optimization strategy means you can (and should) swoop in and quickly set the record straight before the matter devolves into a comment war.
How to execute a cross-channel marketing campaign
Cross-channel marketing can be time-consuming, especially at first. The good news is that the more care you put into the base framework, the less time you’ll spend maintaining and updating your strategy. We’ll look at how to get off on the right foot.
Create common goals
When it comes to cross-channel marketing campaigns, all team members need to be on the same page. If half the group feels that you measure success by revenue and the other half feels that you measure success by brand awareness, it can be difficult to develop a cohesive strategy.
This step can often reveal existing fissures within a company, making it a solid exercise for any team that doesn’t share a clear vision about how to move forward. For instance, you might determine that your cross-channel marketing strategy will largely focus on matching your email marketing and SMS messaging with your social media campaigns.
Map out the customer journey
Consumers can now interact with brands in an ever-increasing number of ways. With cross-channel marketing, you’ll map out every recent touchpoint your consumers have with your company.
Every touchpoint should lead the consumer to common milestones before reaching the brand’s goals. For instance, if you want a customer to sign up for a yearly subscription package, the first step might be signing up for the company’s newsletter via the company website. From there, you might encourage the customer to take advantage of a free trial offer via email.
Look for content gaps
Your content marketing and communication shouldn’t happen in a bubble or break down across channels. For a better cross-channel strategy, first identify interruptions where the customer might get stuck. For example, maybe your mobile app promotes an outdated photo of a product while your website features the current product.
In addition, identify how one channel might follow up with customers on a different channel. For example, if you were marketing a cleaning service to both homeowners and business owners, you can see how a condo owner might be confused if they received an email about how many germs an office building contains.
Cross-channel marketing helps you segment your customers with integrated data and ensures that the messaging you send them matches the action you want them to take.
Bitly Link-in-bio is one simple way to address certain gaps. With Bitly Link-in-bio, you can create branded landing pages that link to all of your most relevant content and include links to that landing page across all of your most popular marketing channels.
When you update your content, you don’t need to worry about updating links or content on each channel—you can simply update the content as needed and make one adjustment to your Link-in-bio. From there, the updates will be live wherever your Link-in-bio appears!
Provide value in exchange for data
Asking for data and collecting data are two very different things. To entice the consumer, clearly communicate the incentive in exchange for their information. Be honest about the data you’re collecting and how the marketing team uses it.
We recommend matching your offers in proportion to the requested data. For instance, you might offer a 10% discount off the customer’s first purchase in exchange for their email address. These incentives communicate to the customer that you respect their information and you’re collecting it to build trust and rapport rather than sell it for short-term gains.
Track, measure, and optimize
As you collect data based on common goals, examine how different parts of the customer journey impact your results. Test changes to one part of the journey and then measure its effects. Ideally, you’ll also connect your insights to second- and third-party data to smooth out inconsistencies across the board.
As patterns emerge, it should become clear how interactions from one channel can optimize another. For instance, you may find that following up with a customer segment via email nets a 10% response rate, whereas following up with the same customer segment via SMS nets a 35% response rate. In this case, you might assume that clogged inboxes are the problem, not that customers are purposely ignoring the follow-up.
With Bitly Analytics, you can keep track of your link and QR Code performance across all of your marketing channels. Easily see when, where, and how your audience engages with your content, and keep track of your top-performing links over time to help optimize your future campaigns.
Communicate the results with your team
With so many marketing channels to choose from and so much accrued data, it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. When you consistently share results with your team and explain them, you ensure every member understands how their day-to-day tasks align with the company’s goals.
You should also share major results or findings with company stakeholders so they understand how the marketing team is contributing to the bottom line. Transparency across the organization can complement common goals and help all departments grow and improve. Plus, the more concrete your results are, the easier it is to justify things like new hires and budget increases for your tech stack.
Reap the benefits of cross-channel marketing for business success
Cross-channel marketing can do more than correct disparate or confusing messaging. It’s a chance for everyone on the marketing team to understand their target demographic better. Once you know what’s driving customer decisions, you can start crafting the right messages on the right channels.
If you could use guidance in optimizing your approach, consider how Bitly’s tools can help you track customer patterns and collect the necessary data to boost your channels.
Our link management tools make it easy to create a unified, positive customer experience. Whether it’s custom-branded short URLs and QR Codes or unified Link-in-bio pages, Bitly makes it easy to build, track, and optimize a unified cross-channel marketing experience.
If you’re ready to integrate your channels and unify your brand’s messaging, get started with Bitly today!