How to Develop a Multichannel Marketing Strategy for Your Business: A Step-by-Step Guide
Do you ever feel unnerved when you notice that a brand is targeting you? Serving too many impressions can lead to an uneasy feeling for many recipients and is a big no-no when developing a multichannel marketing plan. We’re going to detail how to avoid overserving your audience while also reaching them wherever they are.
Step One: Identify/Build Your Audience
It’s vital to start with WHO the campaign should be served to in order to understand the needs and pain points that should be addressed. A whole blog post could be written solely on effective strategies for audience development, but to sum it up, it’s about finding commonalities between past customers and using those to predict who’s most likely to be interested in what you have to offer. A lookalike audience modeled off past customer data is likely to engage at a much higher rate than serving your ads to a random website visitor. Many businesses believe they know their audience, and of course, some do. However, people change, so it’s important to regularly monitor brand engagement and customer feedback/data to make sure you’re reaching the right people.
Step Two: Determine the Goal for Your Campaign
Once you know who you’re trying to reach, the goal of the campaign should be clear. Ask yourself which one of these questions best fits what you’re looking for:
- Do I want people to be able to recognize my brand and add it to their consideration set?
That would be an awareness goal, and the key metric to look at is the number of impressions garnered from the campaign.
- Do I want more people to visit my site and learn about what we offer?
A high click rate may indicate success for this.
- Do I want more qualified sales leads?
Think about creating a form for those leads to fill out.
- Do I want to get my past customers to purchase again?
You might want to retarget contacts in your CRM platform.
Step Three: Choose the Correct Channels
After you’ve created the audience and determined the goal for your campaign, it’s time to serve the ads to where these people are. There are pros and cons to each channel, but like investing in stocks, diversifying your ads between multiple channels can help minimize risk while getting a great return on your ad spend. However, not all channels are equal. It’s of the utmost importance to choose the channels that are right for who you’re serving and what you’re trying to get them to do. For example, Snapchat may not be the right channel for a home remodeling company to advertise on since the median age of users on the platform may not align with the median age of homeowners who are looking for a remodel. If your company is B2B, try LinkedIn, as it allows you to target specific companies and/or job functions.
Step Four: Create a Timeline and Budget
After deciding on which channels are a good fit for your campaign, it’s time to decide how long the campaign will run and how many impressions will be shown to the audience. The longer the campaign runs, the more impressions will be shown, as they’ll be more spread out. A little over 30 impressions per month for each individual target is recommended, but it depends on factors such as:
- Budget
- Number of Channels
- Types of Channels
- Audience Size
It can be easy to overserve a smaller audience and be spread too thin for a larger audience.
The number of impressions is multiplied by the CPM, or cost per thousand impressions, to get the budget per channel. Adding up the budgets of all channels will give the total budget for the market, and then adding the markets together will give the total campaign budget. While the timeline should include the start and end dates for the campaign, it should also include date(s) for pulling data or sending data to the client.
Step Five: Develop Creative with a Unified Theme/Feel
Now that all the pre-campaign planning is done, the next step is to develop the creative, headlines and call to action (CTAs) for your ads. Specifications are different for each channel, but it is vital to have a unified theme. A unified theme is important because the ads should be familiar to the customer regardless of the channel. If the ads lead to a landing page, this should also match the ad creative to ensure that the customer feels confident that where they were directed is where they intended to go.
Step Six: Begin Serving and Monitor Performance
Once the creative is built, it’s go time! Managing campaign performance in all channels at one time can be a lot. An agency partner manages the campaign, from planning to monitoring. Our Multichannel Direct solution takes care of all these steps for you! The job is still not finished once the campaign goes live, as some channels may need to be adjusted or removed if their performance is not up to par. Having a mid-campaign performance report as well as one at the end of the campaign is key to analyzing how optimizations helped the campaign reach its goal.
Step Seven: Use Data to Learn from the Past and Inform the Future
Building off step six, the data from both the middle and end of the campaign should be examined to learn what should be repeated and what should be changed for next time. Running the same campaign repeatedly will eventually fatigue the customer and lead to a decrease in brand reputation. Although running the same creative a couple times in a row for a business looking to increase awareness can help consumers remember the brand, reporting is one of the most important steps in this journey and should not be ignored. Adding graphs and charts can help increase understanding for those not directly involved in the campaign.
Following these steps can help your company expand its reach, increase the number of leads, and/or gain additional website traffic. While it may look simple on paper, it’s a lot to manage, and Infinity Direct is here to work with your team to ensure success. We have many solutions to meet the unique needs of your business. Let’s talk!
