As businesses reopen to welcome foot traffic, many entrepreneurs want to position themselves for growth by maximizing both in-person sales while expanding their online presence. By leveraging multi-channel marketing, businesses drive growth, build brand recognition, and create a powerful confluence between marketing, sales, and customer demand.
Understanding Multi-channel Marketing
To many people, multi-channel marketing is simply using various methods, such as email, social media, and Google Ads to cast a wide net and capture a large audience. However, multi-channel marketing is much more than simply saturating multiple platforms and aiming for quality over quantity. To bring multi-channel marketing to a very tangible level, many businesses find themselves at a crossroads. The pandemic forced them to move operations online, where they were able to reach people and drive sales well beyond their local radius. As restrictions relax and more people venture out into the world, those businesses have an opportunity to recapture their foothold in local marketplaces with either physical brick-and-mortar stores, or by distributing their products locally. To do this, businesses need to form a multi-channel marketing strategy to gain traction on both fronts.
This Isn’t an “Either/Or” Situation
Many businesses feel they have to choose between the audiences they grew in the digital space and the customers they had prior to the pandemic, which they’d like to recapture from local sales. Multi-channel marketing allows businesses to have both, with a greater reach and return. By devising a strategy that is a combination of both digital and conventional marketing methods, each tailored to drive traffic and sales from their respective audience segments, businesses can position themselves for growth while keeping one foot in e-commerce and another in the brick-and-mortar marketplace. Businesses that leverage multi-channel marketing can achieve growth upwards of 30% versus businesses that only use one or two channels to reach their existing and potential customers.
Combining Channels without Confusing Messages
Multi-channel marketing is extremely effective in driving growth for businesses – often upwards of ten points with a 3X return on ad spend per year (source: Facebook for Business). But it can also become very complex very quickly. For example, a great way to drive sales online and in-person is to use social media. Businesses will create multiple profiles to keep marketing for online sales separate from social media users who are seeking out notifications that are pertinent to where they live. “Crossing the streams,” so to speak, can create confusion and alienate both your online audience as well as local customers. Similar situations can arise between online video and television ads. In short, multichannel marketing is extremely effective, but it requires detail-oriented management and the ability to create segmented messaging to reach specific populations.
Don’t Leave Money on the Table
Most importantly, businesses that remain mono-focused and only use one or two channels are passing up a critical opportunity to achieve rapid growth, better returns and to capture a wider, more diverse audience, which translates to increased sales. To learn more about multi-channel marketing, or if you want to implement a strategy for your business to drive growth, reach out to the team at Outpace today.
