5 Common Cross Channel Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

According to the research, 52% of marketers use three to four marketing channels.

The technology available today empowers marketers to learn a lot more about their customers. As a result, digging deep to identify enriching data that can give your campaign an edge is no longer a luxury but a necessity. Cross channel marketing (CCM) is a strategy that enables you to layer your messaging and attract quality leads.

However, to deliver a cohesive and compelling message using CCM, you need to know what pitfalls to avoid. Keep reading to find out the issues that can sink your campaign.

What Is Cross Channel Marketing?

CCM involves bringing your different marketing channels to develop a reasonable progression your audience can follow. Unlike with multi-channel marketing, the channels you use in CCM work together. Thus, when your target audience moves from one channel, your messaging has a context.

Let’s say you send out a blog post to help your audience avoid some common problems with an issue. When a lead reads this post, they later receive a marketing email featuring a customer testimonial. In the eyes of this lead, you gave them the advice to avoid a problem, and they then met a client who benefited from your insight.

Later on, when the same lead is on social media, they can see a compelling headline of how your firm helps people solve the mistakes you mentioned earlier.

With this kind of marketing approach, your target audience does not encounter fragmented information. Just like in the example above, each message builds on the previous one to deliver a whole picture.

Since you are delivering a ‘whole’ message, you can more realistically track its return on investment.

1. Not Unifying Your Data

The foundation of any marketing effort is first to understand your target customer. When marketing across different channels, clearly defining your buyer persona is critical.

Once you develop your buyer persona, you need to corral all your customer-related data. Typically, you need to use a customer relationship management (CRM) tool to help manage your client information.

Gather all the information you have across the various tools you use to manage your customer data. The goal here is to develop a comprehensive collection of your customer touchpoints. That way, no matter what customer data platform (CDP) you depend on, your information can empower seamless CCM.

For example, you can track the URLs or website cookies customers generate to link their online activities to their profile. That can then help you see the emails they interact with, among others. If you send out social media campaigns, you can be able to see which ones resonate with your customers.

All this empowers you to deliver the appropriate messaging and content to your customers.

2. Poor Customer Segmentation

One reason you depend on a CDP is to understand your customers better. A reliable CDP develops reports that enable you to visualize and take in this data helpfully. If, however, you prefer working the numbers manually, you should still aim to interpret the information correctly.

The insights the platform generates then become critical in helping you identify and understand your various customer segments. If you fail to grasp your customer segments, you risk losing essential action points.

For example, visualizing the information might point out that your customers make purchases after a common milestone. That could be a particular number of interactions or even due to certain campaigns.

Due to the lack of an overview of your customer segments, you likely might miss this trend. As a result, you’ll end up flying blind when it comes to delivering on your conversion rates.

Understanding your customer data enables you to identify the segments you serve. In turn, this insight can help you zero in on the best performing channels you should focus on for optimal return.

3. Lack of Optimization

An essential allure of cross-channel marketing is how you can analyze the effect the strategies you apply in one channel affect another. Based on the feedback you get from your analysis, you can report on how to make it more effective.

But having this information alone is not enough to help you unlock the many benefits of CCM. It is the analysis of this data that allows you to identify areas where you can improve your marketing efforts.

If you fail to develop a system to help you regularly make this analysis, you will lose out on valuable insights.

Make it a habit to run experiments across the various channels to uncover potential tweaks you should make. These checks can include:

• A/B testing your emails to find ways to increase their performance
• Testing multiple locations to place calls-to-action and compare the results
• Adjusting the traits through which you target your social media audience

A regular analysis habit will help you add more value to the next step using insights from the previous one.

4. Failing to Customize Content

While a CCM campaign needs an element of unity to work, the content you use must fit each channel. Only after you customize the content to suit each channel do you draw out its power to drive engagement.

For example, if you use a white paper in your email campaign, you should not deploy it in the same format on your website. Such a mistake will continually deliver underperforming CCM campaigns.

5. A Poor Focus on Customer Experience

The ultimate purpose of CCM is to offer a specific experience to your target audience that can result in better conversions.

As you design each step of the campaign, always ask yourself what the customer’s ultimate experience is like. That will guide you on avoiding less compelling strategies across each channel to keep your campaigns productive.

Rev up Your Marketing

The need for more precise customer data input to boost marketing campaigns has never been higher than it is today. In response to this, many professionals are leveraging cross channel marketing to meet with leads across the diverse channels they now use. Learn what pitfalls to sidestep when deploying CMM to not sink your campaign.

Sureshot offers cloud-based customer engagement solutions tailored to put your marketing operation problems to bed. Talk to us today to learn a smarter way to use data for greater marketing success.