What Is Multichannel Marketing? How to Do It Effectively

Vũ Khôi

Author at Wotech Electronics Blog

Multichannel marketing is an inevitable trend every business needs to embrace. Applying a multichannel marketing strategy helps businesses reach more customers, optimize the customer experience, and increase the conversion rate from leads to orders.

However, building a multichannel marketing strategy is no easy feat. So what are the difficulties in building a multichannel marketing system? What should businesses pay attention to?

Table of Contents

What Is Multichannel Marketing?

Multichannel marketing is the approach of combining multiple online and offline marketing channels to reach customers. Today, multichannel marketing comes in two main forms: Omnichannel Marketing and Multichannel Marketing.

Omnichannel marketing

Omni-channel Marketing is a marketing approach that reaches customers across multiple channels simultaneously, building consistent brand experiences across those channels — both online and offline. The purpose of Omnichannel Marketing is to create a friendly, seamless experience for consumers. Customers can search for and buy products online, in physical stores, or by combining the two (for example, buying online and picking up in store).

Multichannel marketing

Multichannel marketing is when a business extends its reach and customer engagement through many different channels, from direct to indirect. The marketing channels operate separately and independently, each with its own strategies and goals. However, the lack of channel integration creates inconsistent experiences, leaving customers unable to grasp the company's message.

Benefits of Applying a Multichannel Marketing Strategy

Wider Reach

When a business expands its marketing to new channels, it reaches more customers. Some customers may only use one or two channels. Multichannel marketing therefore helps businesses avoid missing out on potential audiences.

Optimized Customer Experience

Customer experience is one of the key factors every business needs to care about. Customers judge a business not only by its products and services but also by the buying experience. With multichannel marketing, the business has many channels for reaching customers, creating multiple experiences with consistent content. Customers can shop in many different places. The business can also communicate with, support, and serve customers more quickly and effectively.

A Deeper Understanding of Customers

By reaching customers through many different channels, the business can collect the buying behavior of potential customers on each specific platform. From there, it can identify what habits and needs each customer segment has, what information they pay attention to, and how they shop. All this information helps the business understand its customers better and chart long-term marketing strategies for the future.

Greater Customer Loyalty

By optimizing the customer experience, the business meets customer needs anywhere and delivers the best services. Moreover, drawing on data from different channels, the business can create plans for building even better experiences. As a result, customers grow fond of the business and gradually become loyal customers. Those loyal customers act as brand ambassadors, spreading the word about your company to friends, family, and people around them.

Difficulties in Building a Multichannel Marketing System

Effective Management

Having many different marketing channels requires the business to manage them more effectively and allocate resources to suit each channel. Related information also needs to be managed, stored, and updated quickly, to avoid information bottlenecks that make it hard for departments to share data with one another. This also ensures the strategy runs according to plan and the business can control activities and handle emerging issues in a timely way.

Consistent Messaging Across Channels

Because every marketing channel has its own characteristics, building a consistent message across channels is not easy. Many businesses forget to connect their communication channels with one another, resulting in inconsistency when conveying information to customers. As a result, customers misunderstand and lose important information during their buying experience with the brand.

Hard-to-Measure Channel Performance

Measuring the effectiveness of many marketing channels is no easy task. Businesses struggle to control and measure the performance of multiple marketing channels because each different channel has its own characteristics, so measuring performance requires suitable methods as well.

Making the Most of Customer Data

Having too much customer data also makes it hard for marketers to classify and select the right figures and use that data effectively. According to Gartner, over 37% of marketers face obstacles when using customer data, and 55% find it difficult to profile potential customers based on that data. Moreover, data quality is a real concern, with 65% of marketers saying data quality needs improvement.

How to Build an Effective Multichannel Marketing Strategy?

Break Down the Organization's "Silos"

Silos are the situation where departments refuse to cooperate and share information with one another, working in isolation. Departments then tend to ignore activities outside their own walls, believing those aren't their business. Staff across departments stop working together, morale drops, and work performance suffers as a result.

When doing multichannel marketing, the business must market on both online and offline platforms. This requires cooperation between different departments — not just the marketing department. For example, when the business develops SEO on its website, the Marketing department works with the IT department to ensure the website always stays stable. Breaking down "silos" requires the entire organization to share a single goal that delivers value to everyone. Then the business can create a unified message and bond its departments together.

Leverage Multichannel Marketing Tools

Choosing marketing tools that help you measure and optimize marketing activities is essential for businesses. This software and these systems help you track, execute, and manage marketing activities — specifically: strategy management, advanced analytics, support for executing marketing and digital marketing activities, and more. In addition, the business can assess customers' buying behavior, segment customers, and devise an effective multichannel marketing approach.

Analyze and Understand Your Target Audience

Multichannel marketing campaigns require the business to have a deeper view of the market. The business needs to collect enough data and analyze its target customers — sketching out their characteristics, behaviors, and requirements, and segmenting the audience. From there, it can choose marketing channels suited to each customer group and draft fitting marketing strategies.

Create a Consistent Message

Even when marketing across many different channels, the business needs to build a consistent message. This helps customers remember your brand more easily. That said, businesses shouldn't repeat the same messages for long periods across different channels. Instead, the business should maintain a consistent image across channels, while the message itself can change depending on each campaign and medium.

Build a Multichannel Marketing System with SimERP

Track the Buying Journey and Manage Customer Relationships

With SimERP's CRM feature, the business can track and manage every stage of the customer's buying journey — from first contact with the brand through the first "touch point" to closing the deal and using the product. Users can update and manage customer information at each stage to understand customer needs and devise suitable outreach plans.

Store Information and Analyze Leads

The business can store customer information such as name, address, company, phone number, email, Zalo, and more. It can also manage the interaction history between customers and the business, then analyze characteristics and buying habits to build plans tailored to them.

Build an Email Marketing Strategy

The business can create email templates, and set up and run email marketing campaigns for each stage. This is a way to reach and attract new customers and build close relationships with existing ones.

Build a Process for Managing Marketing Channels

With the Projects feature, the business can create a process for managing its marketing channels. Each project includes the workflows and steps of each marketing channel. On that basis, the business can control the activity of each marketing channel.

Sync Marketing Channel Data

All marketing information and data is stored in the SimERP system. This data lets staff access it quickly and keeps the flow of information smooth. The business can then plan and execute multichannel marketing activities more effectively.

Today, SimERP offers a SimCRM package with a free 30-day trial. Sign up now to experience the omnichannel order management system with SimCRM!

Closing thoughts

Building a multichannel marketing system is essential for most businesses. The company can reach customers better, attract more new customers, and retain existing ones — thereby increasing sales. We hope this article has given you useful information about multichannel marketing!

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