A Making a positive impression on your consumers requires connecting them where they spend their time, giving them the content and benefits they need, when they need it and how they want it. Consumers have more power today than ever before, and marketers have to meet their audience by determining which platforms they are interacting with and when, and that’s where cross-channel marketing comes in. 

With cross-channel marketing, you can connect on every touchpoint, allowing you to optimize your message every time your consumer interacts with your brand.

What is Cross-Channel Marketing?

Cross-channel marketing is a combination of multiple marketing channels, including email, web, mobile, apps, SMS, call center, in-store, and direct mail; where you can create a more cohesive customer journey for your target audience. 

Every channel should work together to create a connected brand message that leads your consumers from one to the other. For example, you read an article you wrote about the pitfalls of an issue your product solves. Later, in the evening, your lead receives an email where you provide a customer testimonial who overcame the same issue using your product. Then, your lead went into social media where they see an advertisement, where you describe how your product completely removes the issue they are initially reading about in your article. 

Being a marketer, you need to ensure that the cross-channel experiences should be relevant to where the customer is in the buying stage.

Why Should You Use Cross-Channel Marketing Attribution?

Cross-channel marketing attribution encompasses tracking your user conversions from their original digital sources. While doing cross-channel marketing, companies use paid channels and organic channels – it is important to track when your users are acquired or converted, they can be tied back to the channel (be it social media, e-mail, the mobile web, or another channel) with precision, confidence and accuracy. 

Most companies use cross-channel marketing for their products or services, which is why it is necessary to perform cross-channel attribution. You need to use one unifying dashboard or service to track attribution across each channel. The marketing efforts you make for each channel will have aggregate attribution data and store it in one database. A cross-channel attribution provider like Growth Nirvana will allow you to track and aggregate the attribution data across multiple channels in one central location.

Benefits of Cross-channel Marketing Attribution

It’s always better to have an insight from multi-channel attribution that provides you with a better understanding of what is and isn’t working. Have a look at some other benefits that multi-channel attribution can bring to your marketing efforts – 

1. Predictive modeling

With all the high-quality data, it’s possible to use predictive models. You can see which channels are more beneficial and generate the most revenue, and help you reformulate your marketing mix and create more conversions.

2. Funnel Analysis

The channels you are using for your marketing mix, and there are channels that work well together. With the help of cross-channel reporting, you can have complete transparency of data gathered from multiple channels. This data helps you see what works well for your organization and shortlist the channels which bring higher conversions. 

3. Channel Comparison and Analysis

Cross-channel reporting helps you derive a better understanding of:

1. Various marketing channels
2. The content-type people like to engage with
3. Their relationships with each other
4. The content that brings the highest engagement rate
5. Factors that lead a potential customer to convert

4. Improved customer experience

While using cross-channel marketing attribution, you can see the immediate advantage of it by witnessing an improved customer experience. With all the data in your hand, you can easily understand customer behavior, expectations, and needs, then you can align the marketing strategies that are more relevant, targeted, and engaging. 

Now, you may have questions like – 

isn’t it similar to a multi-channel marketing approach?

How can it be good for your business?

Let’s dig a little deeper to understand the difference between the two – 

Difference Between Cross-channel Marketing and Multi-Channel Marketing

Multi-channel marketing means communicating with customers on different channels. The key difference is that the channels are separate. All channels work independently with no connection between them, meaning consumers can’t easily hop from one channel to another during the same message journey. 

Whereas cross-channel marketing, similar to multi-channel marketing, involves communicating with different channels, it also entails passing data between channels to create a seamless customer experience. In this scenario, customers can “cross over” between channels.

These two approaches are not opposed to each other. Cross-channel is a subset of multi-channel. You can say, a multi-channel marketing campaign approach might not be cross-channel, but a cross-channel campaign approach is inherently multi-channel. 

Tips for Successful Cross-Channel Marketing Attribution

The goal of cross-channel marketing is to create a personalized experience for your customers across the channels they are in. Below are the best practices when crafting your next campaign:

1. Create Customer Personas

Knowing the customers gives you the upper hand in creating personalized messages that actually convert them into leads. Creating comprehensive customer profiles can help evaluate your target audience’s shopping habits, and uncover patterns and commonalities between groups, allowing you to identify audience segments. These insights can help you drive future strategies and messaging and create repeatable success. 

2. Leverage Data-driven Decision-making

Organizations must be data-driven to develop a successful marketing campaign. They need to track who are their target audience, what messaging they respond to, and what platforms work well. These high-quality data from multiple channels will identify buying patterns and trends that can be utilized to contextualize your audience’s preferences and decisions. 

3. Choose the Right Marketing Technology

It’s crucial to choose the right marketing techniques that can give you actionable insights into your customer’s preferences. The technology needs to gather accurate, and high-quality data. With the right marketing performance solution, you can gain a more holistic view of your target audience. Also, automation is another functionality that can determine what tool is going to be the best for your company. Among other things, marketing technologies should enable the marketing team to optimize:

1. When they show ads,
2. Which channels do they display their ads on, and
3. The right kind of messages to interact with their target audience.

4. Continuously Optimize Multiple KPIs

A successful campaign consists of the right evaluation of past data and applying those lessons to future strategies. Being the marketer, you should be continuously optimizing your messages for multiple key performance indicators (KPIs) throughout the entire marketing funnel. The collected data can give important insights into marketing ROI, allowing them to make informed decisions about how the campaign can be optimized in the future. 

Marketers face a lot of challenges each day in tracking and analyzing digital data. Cross-channel measurement and reporting help them create a more realistic understanding of data, the interaction being made in each channel, and their contribution to the marketing ROI. 

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