You create a great product and an amazing video to promote it. You run a quick lead generation campaign and build a list of 100 prospects. All excited, you send a promotional email with your product video and other product details to all your leads.
Days pass, and you hear nothing but crickets chirping.
This often happens when you rely on one marketing channel only. Maybe it’s time to explore cross-channel marketing.
Here’s a detailed guide to cross-channel marketing and how you can implement cross-channel tools to share your videos.
Cross channel marketing or omnichannel marketing is a marketing strategy that includes multiple marketing channels to ensure a smooth buyer’s journey at all stages of the funnel. Here’s a quick example to understand this concept.
Let’s say you’re a retail store and you want to promote your business on multiple channels. One way can be to run paid ads. You can also do social media. If you’re going to leverage traditional marketing, you can run banner ads, print newspaper ads, or distribute sales flyers etc.
In multi-channel marketing, you integrate all these channels. So, for example, you can put a custom QR code in your store and link it to your website or social media. This bridges the online-offline gap and ignites cross-channel marketing.
Cross-channel marketing tools are mobile apps and computer software programs that allow you to develop and manage a cross-channel marketing campaign.
Here are a few examples of cross-channel marketing tools.
Stay tuned, as we’ll delve deep into cross-channel marketing tools in the later sections of this content.
If you’re not utilizing video to promote your brand and products, you’re missing out on lucrative opportunities. However, creating engaging and informative videos is just the beginning. You need to implement a robust marketing strategy so your video marketing content reaches a large audience.
But this may not be possible if you use a single channel for marketing. To ensure superior engagement, you’ll need to utilize multiple channels.
Here’s why you should leverage cross-channel marketing to share your video content.
Let’s say you use email as your primary marketing channel. Email is great and can provide an ROI of up to 42:1. Not many people check emails, let alone opening your email, and watching a video for a few minutes.
On the other hand, people on YouTube and social media want to watch videos. These are the platforms where your target audience will always be looking for engaging video content. While social media may not offer a high ROI, it can certainly play a pivotal role in improving engagement.
As a result, people will start recognizing your brand across multiple channels. And when more people know and talk about your brand, they are more likely to make a purchase.
We live in a hyper-competitive business landscape where customers have too many options to choose from. If you fail to convince them to stick with you, they’ll move to another brand without breaking a sweat. Hence, customer loyalty is the key to success in this vying marketplace.
Using cross-channel marketing allows you to send out a consistent brand message across multiple platforms. When your customers get the same brand experience on various channels, they’ll consider you a credible, trustworthy brand. If they trust you, they’ll stay loyal to you in the long run.
Customers want to interact with their favorite brands on multiple channels. A Backlinko study showed that a person has an average of 8.6 social media accounts in 2020. This clearly indicates that people want to use different channels to consume unique content.
By implementing cross-channel marketing, you can align with this changing customer behavior. You can engage your audience on multiple channels, thereby giving them the luxury to interact with you wherever and whenever they want to.
The concept of cross-channel marketing seems straightforward. After all, all you need to do is create a presence on different channels, right?
Unfortunately, that’s not how it works.
Here’s a step-by-step process to create a cross-channel marketing strategy from scratch.
An effective cross-channel marketing strategy begins with creating the right buyer personas. Work with your marketing team to develop rich buyer personas that accurately personify your ideal customers. Your buyer profiles should comprise your customers’ needs, challenges, pain points, desires, and other factors that might influence their buying decision.
There are more than 100 social media websites out there. And that’s just social media. You can explore email, website, forums, and other channels online. You can also go beyond the internet and exploit TV, radio, newspaper, magazine, and the list goes on.
But don’t let this copious number of channels and mediums overwhelm you. When it comes to cross-channel marketing, be selective. Conduct thorough research and choose the channels where your target customers spend their most time.
Once you’ve selected your channels, you’d need to consolidate your data. The premise of cross-channel marketing is to make your video marketing efforts interconnected across various channels.
So, be sure to capture touchpoints on all the mediums and integrate them in one place. You can do so by tracking URLs and browsing cookies to track your consumers’ actions and browsing behavior.
No two buyers are the same. While the emotion behind the purchase could be similar, every customer is different and hence should be treated uniquely.
Let’s say a buyer comes across your product video, visits your eCommerce site, but abandons the cart. In this case, you should send an email offering them a discount or a better offer.
Now, suppose another customer follows the same path, but instead of abandoning the cart, she makes the purchase. In this case, you should send an email thanking the customer for the purchase. This way, you can provide personalized experiences to your customers.
It’s not a good idea to rely heavily on social media. But if used strategically, social media platforms can be a gamechanger in your cross-channel marketing strategy.
You can use social channels like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok to share your videos and divert the traffic to your website and other channels. Social media is also a great place to interact with your customers and answer their queries.
Also, don’t forget, paid social advertising. Using paid social ads the right way can go a long way in enhancing your social media marketing efforts.
An American Express report showed that 90% of US consumers consider customer service a major factor in selecting a brand.
When you provide better service, you retain more customers, which translates to more business, higher revenue, and enhanced reputation.
When you implement cross-channel marketing, ensure that you focus a substantial amount of time and effort on providing exceptional customer service.
Note: If you’re new to cross-channel marketing, be prepared for uncertainties. Your campaign could boom and produce results beyond your expectations. Or it might not perform as well as you expected. If the latter is the case, keep on testing different strategies and tweak your cross-channel marketing tactics accordingly.
To implement a cross-channel marketing strategy, you’ll need an arsenal of cross-channel tools. However, with so many options available, finding the tools that align with your requirements can be challenging.
Consider the following aspects to select the best cross-channel tools for video marketing.
As discussed, creating accurate customer profiles is one of the primary steps of cross-channel marketing. Cross-channel tools, such as website analytics solutions and email marketing systems, provide customer insights that enable you to develop buyer personas. However, these tools use different algorithms, which can lead to discrepancies in data.
Therefore, it’s essential to pick tools that allow you to create unified customer profiles. They should consolidate data collected from various touch points so that you can develop laser-focused buyer personas.
Personalization has become one of the key factors that customers consider when selecting a brand. Including small personalization elements like addressing the customer by her name in the email can drastically improve the engagement rate.
Ensure that your cross-channel toolkit provides complete, in-depth insights about your customers. You can leverage these insights to provide personalized customer experiences.
The ultimate goal of cross-channel marketing is to target customers on multiple channels, platforms, and devices. Find a tool that allows you to do the same.
Everyone uses connected devices. This means starting one to one communication with a customer is more difficult than ever. By using tools that allow cross-channel targeting, you can engage your customers across multiple platforms and devices.
Timing plays a crucial role in the success of a marketing campaign. Sharing the right type of content on the right platform at the right time is critical to achieving the results you desire from your cross-channel marketing efforts.
Hence, it’s essential to find cross-channel tools that allow you to optimize your content and share it at a time that ensures higher consumer engagement.
A major mistake most brands make in cross-channel marketing is sharing the same content across all platforms. That’s a huge no-no. Though it’s essential to maintain consistency, using the same content on all channels won’t give your consumers a reason to follow you.
Find cross-channel tools that allow you to optimize your content as per each platform. For example, a 6-minute video would be great to share on YouTube, but you’ll need to extract the best 15-second clip from it to share it on TikTok.
If you’re scratching your head trying to figure out which cross-channel tools to use, your search ends here. Here are the six types of cross-channel tools every business should know about.
Marketing your product or service online has become more challenging than ever. Using a single channel to promote your business can be detrimental to your business in this competitive arena. Cross-channel tools allow you to engage your customers on multiple channels, resulting in better engagement and more conversions.
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