Multi-Channel Marketing Tools You Must Have In 2019
Did you know that 90% of consumers expect consistent interactions with a brand, across all channels?
While multi-channel marketing is not a new concept, it is highly relevant for all types of businesses, now more than ever. With the popularity of the digital era and the short concentration span of consumers, it is vital for a brand to be present across all channels for brand awareness.
However, before getting into the specifics, let’s start from the basics.
What is Multi-Channel Marketing?
Simply put, just as the name states, multi-channel marketing is creating a strategy that concepts of reaching your target audience through multiple channels and methods of distribution. By utilizing a number of platforms, businesses can maximize their opportunities to reach potential consumers. A ‘channel’ can vary from a brick & mortar store to a company website, to social media platforms, to print and hoarding ads. There is no limit to what a business can use a channel to reach its targeted consumer.
Why Invest in Multi-Channel Marketing?
56% of marketers have stated that every dollar spent in-store is either directly or indirectly influenced by digital transactions. What’s more, 62% of consumers who engage in their favourite brand on 10+ channels make weekly purchases.
It’s no secret that consumers today are spoiled for choice. In such cases, the number of times they are made aware of your brand, the more likely they are to choose you. That’s where multi-channel marketing comes in. Mentioned below are certain benefits of investing in multichannel marketing:
Increased Brand Awareness
This main purpose of this type of marketing is to catch the attention of as many users as possible, and as many times as possible. Hence, the more channels your brand is present on, the higher the possibility of user interaction.
Let Your Customer Choose
By being present on multiple channels, you can reach the consumer of their preferred channel. This helps increase familiarity and convenience for the consumer, thereby increasing the chances of consumer satisfaction.
More Data = Better Strategy
Do your consumers prefer digital interaction or a brick and mortar store? Does your customer like your product and recommend it to their friends? Do your customers have any feedback for you? Multi-channel marketing can give you answers to all of these questions, thereby helping you build a better strategy.
That being said, multi-channel marketing isn’t as easy as it looks like. There are certain challenges.
What Are The Challenges of Multi-Channel Marketing?
Every type of marketing comes with its own set of challenges. Currently, 45% of marketers feel that they lack the talent, technology, and processes to efficiently carry out multi-channel marketing. Here are some challenges that most marketers face:
Focus Could Divert From The Strategy
A lot of marketers often make a common mistake while conducting multi-channel marketing. Every kind of marketing is built on a particular strategy. However, in this type of marketing, marketers tend to focus on the number of channels the business is present on, instead of creating a strategy. While it’s true the aim of multi-channel is to be present across as many platforms as possible, it needs to come with certain logic.
Increased Number of Touchpoints Lead To Increased Complexity:
When your brand is present on a number of channels, you need to ensure the brand message, customer experience, and product quality is the exact same. Moreover, you need to ensure that all the consumer requests and questions are being answered and addressed, no matter which channel it comes from. Hence, all the departments in your company need to be constantly aligned and work in collaboration.
Maintaining Customer Experience
When your consumer interacts with the brand just on the website, it is easy to ensure they have the best experience and you can cater to their needs and requirements instantaneously. However, when you add the platforms from which consumers can interact with your brand and communicate with you, it can become challenging to maintain high consumer experience.
Analyzing Market Response
If your consumer is interacting with your brand on multiple channels, it can be challenging to identify from which platform and which campaign your consumer is responding to. This hampers with your capability to analyze the market response on various channels. Hence, you won’t be able to determine which platform is giving the best and poorest results, which is crucial to make a decision. For example, you may pour a ton of money on social media, however, it is not reaping any benefits. Without any data to prove this, you won’t be able to stop activities on that channel.
Increased Time & Resources
Due to the complexities mentioned above, a business needs to double their man-power and resources if they want to effectively build a multi-channel platform. This will hamper the overall budget of the company and your marketing efforts will give you lesser ROI than expected.
These challenges can easily be solved with one solution; marketing tools. Yes, by having a dedicated tool that looks after the basics for you in each channel, you will have the time to build a strategy that drives the highest ROI to your business.
Mentioned below is a list of the best tools you should consider investing in across the most popular channels used for multi-channel marketing:
Multi-Channel Tools You Must Have
Email Marketing
A lot of arguments have been made that email marketing is dead. But, that is far from true. In fact, a study published by the Content Marketing Institute shows that 79% of B2B marketers consider email marketing as the most effective distribution channel for their business.
But, the success rate of email campaigns solely depends on how well you’ve targetted your emails. A good email marketing tool can help you effectively create an email campaign.
Here are the top 3 email marketing tools you could consider investing in:
MailChimp
Founded in 2001, MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing tools. With its specific pricing options that are perfect for SMEs and startups, MailChimp is a boon for companies with a low budget. The software has also been a Nexus Award recipient in 2017.
MailChimp provides all the best features that an email marketing tool should have, like email tracking, sign up forms, spam filter diagnostics, autoresponders, split-testing, etc. Some of the benefits of using MailChimp are:
- Creating unique campaigns
- Great options for integration
- Conduct A/B testing to identify what works best
Read our complete review on MailChimp to know more about this software.
That being said, what makes MailChimp a great option for your multi-marketing channel mix is the vast number of tool integrations it provides. This allows you to ensure your strategy is aligned across all channels.
Zoho Campaigns
Part of the famous Zoho family, Zoho Campaigns is a cloud-based email marketing tool. This software provides the option to segregate lists based on the consumer and send relevant customer emails to them. It also contains pre-designed templates, allowing you to create the perfect email within minutes.
What makes it a great tool for multi-channel marketing is the great CRM and social media integration it offers. Built specially for marketing processes, it connects with multiple various channels like YouTube, GSuite, Facebook, WordPress, SurveyMonkey, etc. Additionally, being part of the Zoho family, you can easily integrate with any of the Zoho tools.
GetResponse
GetResponse is more than just an email marketing software. While this tool allows users to create professional and well-designed emails, it can also be used for more. GetResponse users can easily build well-designed software using the tool. Moreover, with the analytic tools provided by the software can help you increase conversion rates.
Another feature that helps GetResponse stand out of the crowd and makes it a great multi-channel tool is its webinar marketing solution. Not only does this provide another channel to market your brand, but also combines the efforts of two channels in one platform. The popularity of GetResponse is global with it being available in 182 countries, and currently has approximately one billion subscribers monthly.
Social Media
The social media wave has been here for a while and judging by its popularity, it’s here to stay. Nearly 75% of B2B buyers say that social media plays a huge impact on their buying decision. That being said, let’s dive right into the best tools you should use for effective social media marketing:
Buffer:
A web and mobile app, Buffer is used for streamlining all social media accounts on different platforms. With an organized interface and simple to use layout, users can easily publish posts across multiple social media channels with one click.
Additionally, Buffer also has great reporting and tracking tools, which help understand which posts and which channel helped you gain maximum traction. What’s more, you can even simply schedule posts easily on this platform.
Oktopost
Oktopost, a social media management platform, is best suited for enterprise-level B2B companies. The main aim of this tool is to drive lead generation and marketing attribution through social media.
To achieve this, Oktopost provides its users with features that allow them to monitor multiple profiles, boost social media engagement and facilitate employee advocacy.
BuzzSumo
Unlike other social media marketing tools, BuzzSumo’s focus is on finding trending content from top influencers in your niche. BuzzSumo provides its users with a social search engine, which helps businesses find shareable content available on social media based on trending topics.
This tool also provides information about your competitors, like which channels they are using or what type of content they are sharing. This helps to ensure that your efforts yield the maximum returns.
Lead Management
A multi-channel marketing tool bundle would be incomplete without adding tools that actually bind the efforts of all the different tools and use it to achieve one vision. A good lead management tool is a mix of both CRM capabilities and marketing automation. This helps a representative get a proper view of the journey of a prospective customer throughout the sales process.
Here are the top 3 lead management tools that are currently on the top of the lot:
HubSpot CRM
HubSpot CRM is specially designed for speed and efficiency. The biggest advantage of using this tool is that a user can make use of the tool without changing anything in their existing workflow. Moreover, this tool integrates well with a number of other marketing tools across all platforms. This makes HubSpot CRM the centre of multi-channel marketing model, from where you can efficiently drive your business forward. Additionally, HubSpot CRM was the winner of FinancesOnline’s 2018 Best CRM Award.
Do you believe that this software is ideal to drive your business forward? You can read our in-depth review, where you will get a brief overview of the key metrics, features, pricing plans, pros and cons, support and integrations of using this software.
Salesforce Essentials
A combined wonder of Salesforce’s Sales Cloud and Service Cloud offerings, Salesforce Essentials is a package for small businesses. Basically, with this tool, you get both sales intelligence and customer support capabilities, which very useful for SMBs.
Additionally, you can easily integrate Salesforce Essential with a majority of tools in your multi-channel bundle!
Marketo
Marketo was founded in 2006. Today, there are over 2,300 B2B organizations all over the world that use Marketo. A comprehensive marketing automation platform, Marketo is designed for large enterprise-level companies. The main functionality of the tool is to streamline the entire marketing process. This will enable you to get more done with your marketing and sales workflows. Additionally, this tool also gives you access to an online community of marketers. The main purpose of this community is to share ideas, collaborate and influence the development of the product.
In conclusion, while multi-channel marketing is not easy. But if it is done right, it can quickly become the best strategy that you’ve ever implemented, while yielding the highest ROI. By choosing the best tools from this list, you can easily streamline your efforts and create the best strategy that is sure to be a raging success for your business.
Till then, keep reading ToolsMetric for tool reviews and tips and tricks of marketing!
