Why one marketing channel is rarely enough

Do your or your business do marketing? When we think about it most businesses do in some fashion. But how many marketing channels do you use? For example:

• Email marketing
• Social media
• Google ads
• Telemarketing

Most businesses we speak to use only one or two channels and most of the time those channels aren’t talking to each other. In this article, we are going to explore how you can benefit from using multiple channels in your marketing (multichannel marketing) and why it doesn’t need to cost the earth.

Firstly, do you understand branding?

This may seem like a strange place to start but understanding branding is crucial to making a multi-channel marketing campaign work for your business. Most people think of branding as being their logo, but it is so much more than that.

The definition of branding according to the branding journal is:

“A brand is a name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers”

In simple terms a brand is how you identify with a company, for example we have different perception of Waitrose compared to Aldi. We see Waitrose as being premium, therefore their packaging, their logo, their uniforms, everything about Waitrose has to give the impression of quality.

From our point of view a good brand means that you can remove a logo from whatever you are looking at and instantly recognise that what you are looking at belongs to a particular business. For example, we could remove the Coca Cola name from their Christmas advert, and we would still know that the advert belonged to Coca Cola.

So what?

Bringing this back to the beginning, why is branding so important to your social media marketing? The answer is simple, according to Rain Group, it takes eight touch points to make a sale. This is important! It means that you need to contact customers across multiple channels and each of those channels needs to feel the same, whether that is the colour, the font, the imagery. If a prospect sees you on social media, receives an email and then visits your website everything needs to feel like it comes from the same business.

How to choose the right marketing channels

In the branding section we have identified the fact that multiple touch points are needed with our prospects before they become customers, this therefore means that we need to choose the channels that we are going to use. Here are just a few for consideration:

With so many options available how do you choose the right ones for your business?

Does it reach your target audience?

Not all marketing channels work for all businesses, that’s why there are so many of them. You therefore need to decide where will your prospects be. For example, if you are wanting to promote your product to single person independent hairdressers then LinkedIn may not be your best channel, but if you are targeting people in insurance broking then LinkedIn can be very powerful. We have one client who sells insurance to Chauffeur drivers. 

They spend a lot of time on Facebook groups making themselves part of the Chauffeur community so that large number of people know who they are and whenever there is a question about insurance in the group, my client is always included in the conversation. The moral of the story is go to wherever your target audience are.

Does it suit my budget?

This is a key question that you need to consider when choosing your marketing channel. Not to be pessimistic but some of your marketing channels will fail. If you push too much money into the wrong one, then it is going to have a negative effect on your business. There is also the issue of cashflow, for example one of the things that my business does is build websites. I am confident that if I was to run a Google Ads campaign that I would make money on it. But money from websites can take a long time to reach the bank account, which is why this might not be a good marketing channel for me, so I don’t use it. However, if you're like some of our businesses that know you get an immediate sale from your website then Pay Per Click is an option for you.

Does it allow me to effectively communicate my message?

Linking very closely with targeting your target audience the channel also needs to be fit for the message that you are delivering. We have one client, The Vintage Sofa Co. who use imagery as part of their unique selling point. They rely on platforms where they can build a community around the images that they post.

If you are selling to people who are short on time then video can work better than blogs, (thank you to those who have read this far). However, if you are dealing with a technical audience then blogs and whitepapers that can get across more detail may be the better option for you. 

Choosing your audience and how you want to communicate can also be highly important in how you design your website. If you are wanting to provide information about your business to people that might be considering you in a tender or to people that may already know your name the industry then your messaging, look feel and navigation are going to be different to a company that is selling on their website and are going to be pushing people to make a purchase.

Can you measure your campaign on your chosen platform?

Measurement has been one of the key developments in digital marketing with most channels providing you information on statistics, whether this is Google Analytics, Social Measuring tools, or statistics provided by your email provider.

There are also ways to measure your non-digital marketing channels. For a relatively low cost you can create false numbers that are directed to your chosen office number. This means that each campaign that you do can have a different phone number on it. This means that you will know whether your phone call has come from your website, a leaflet, or an advert. 

Of course, measuring for the sake of measuring is pointless, you need to understand what you are measuring and how to take the appropriate action from it. For example, I went to visit a business the other week. They were struggling for leads and were looking for help. They had someone providing PPC for them and they didn’t think it was working and they were going to end their spend with them. When I reviewed the data with them, I could see that the other agency were doing a great job and for a small budget achieving a lot of success. I therefore suggested that this business not only stick with their existing provider, but that they should increase their spend with them. Measuring your results and then making the correct decision from those results leads to more successful marketing campaign.

In the budget section I made the statement that not all marketing channels will work for your business and at times you will lose money. My advice to clients has always been to start out on multiple channels with a small budget and then evaluate the data from each. For the channels that are working you can increase your spend or your time, and for the ones that aren’t you can pull away.

Get your channels to work together

Without getting too technical marketing works better when it is integrated. In short when your marketing channels are helping each other out. Think about the following scenario.

You sell software to the legal sector and you have a new product that you want to launch. You have a working Newsletter but you want to have more subscribers you could do something like the following.

1. You create a strong whitepaper with lots of useful information to the legal sector.
2. You put the whitepaper behind a gateway where people need to give you their contact details.
3. From here you promote the whitepaper to a targeted audience using LinkedIn ads
4. Once the Newsletter starts to gain subscribers you then start to send them emails which can then push people to the new product on your website
5. Some interested clients will click on the link to your website
6. Your email then follows up with an offer for those people that clicked on the link to the product.

This simplistic example shows how you can use your different marketing channels to work together to promote your business. What it does highlight is that channels which work together are always going to get you a better return on your investment.

To conclude

Marketing works best when you use more than one channel but to make those channels work for you they need to work together and you need to be able to measure their results so that you can invest in what works and discard what doesn’t.

If you want more information on how to make the most of your marketing, contact Guy from The Marketing Guy.

You can find The Marketing Guy under the 'Full Service Agency' or 'Website Design/Development' options.

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