Don’t put all your eggs in one basket - This is a famous proverb you must have heard. And it aptly describes the digital marketing scape of the present day. Brands adopt various strategies to get the maximum effort from their investments, including partnering with many media sources, diversifying ad spend, and building a brand presence in prime marketing channels. Most of these activities can be clubbed under the umbrella of cross channel marketing. Consumers interact with a brand at multiple levels, in distinct capacities. Realizing the drift of their interests is essential for marketers to maintain a healthy relationship with them. This is a very distinctive feature of modern marketing. While traditional marketing has always focussed on one marketing channel (regardless of its ROI capability), modern marketing emphasizes the need to track all customer interactions, analyzing, and optimizing them for better returns. Needless to say, it is an extensive process. One that requires sheer dedication and the support of a mobile marketing platform. In this article, we’ll take you through the basics of cross channel marketing, noting its pros, cons, and application methods that you can adopt for your workflows. Let’s begin!

What is Cross Channel Marketing?

Cross channel marketing refers to the activity of promoting your brand through multiple media sources, which include both online and offline platforms. A cross channel strategy can include anything from age-old emails, blogs, and SMS to fairly modern social media, mobile apps, vlogs, and podcasts. The objective of cross channel marketing is to stay connected with the users and always keep them in the loop about the latest updates in products, services, and brand offerings. It is also known as multi-channel marketing, because it taps into the customer journeys at multiple touchpoints, delivering content that adheres to different buyer intents. As imperative, cross channel digital marketing i sure to reap many benefits!

Minimal Costs, High Returns: Advantages of Cross Channel Marketing

1. More Attention -  The brand will be able to draw high user traction through cross-channel marketing, thereby enhancing brand awareness. This will gradually make your brand’s name pop up in the minds of target audiences when they think of a product or service you provide.

2. Low Cost - Platforms like social media, emails, and affiliate channels are generally low-cost with effectively wider reach. This in turn, can help in increasing ROI with low expenditure.

3. Create a Strong Foundation - When advertising through multiple channels, marketing your product will be relatively easy, and strong customer bases can be built based on different criteria. It also helps to add personalization to your ad copies by bridging the gap between customer expectations and delivery. 

4. Optimize Communication - Cross channel marketing campaigns engage with customers differently according to their needs and preferences. A customer who is new to your brand is treated differently than a customer who has been acquainted with you for a long time. Thus, optimized marketing can be done to efficiently communicate with the users, if not yield greater conversion rates.

5. More Digital Touchpoints - Data plays a pivotal role in marketing. Using cross-channel marketing allows brands to collect more user data, from their demographics to professional affiliations. Usage of artificial intelligence and machine learning are also innovative techniques that can leverage historical data to guide your upcoming marketing campaigns. 

Odds in the Offerings: Disadvantages of Cross Channel Marketing

Despite the diverse range of benefits, all’s not well in the cross channel marketing world. Here are some areas that prove to be challenging for marketers of all sizes while implementing their cross channel strategy:

1. High amount of Data - The more data you collect through cross channel digital marketing, the more difficult it becomes to assess it. Every platform comes with its own set of reporting capabilities that need to be sieved, collated, and analyzed so that you don’t end up wrecking your brain over a vanity metric. Other than that, you may also receive poor-quality data which does not help us to improve performance or provide any insights. 

2. Difficulty in Reaching Customers at the Right Time - Cross channel marketing helps us reach a huge amount of customers. However, since there are (way too) many channels to operate, marketers struggle to find the right way to reach customers at the precise time. It becomes increasingly difficult to predict where the customers will be at a given point in time, thereby giving your personalization strategies a major setback. 

3. Difficulty in Finding the Right Channel - Just as every user cohort cannot be your target, every marketing channel cannot be an efficient means of communication. Your choice of channels should align with the marketing goals. One way to qualify them is as per the user intent that they address. For instance, social media is least beneficial if your KPIs are set on conversions, whereas it can be a game changer if your set target is market penetration.  

As the pros and cons of cross channel marketing stand to show, efficient attribution tracking and optimization of ad campaigns can make a significant difference in the results that your strategy yields. For this, a platform like Trackier should be with you as a true companion helping in your journey to growth, and establishing a good position for your brand in the market.