In today’s fast-paced and highly digital world, marketers have to meet their target audience where they are, offering enhanced convenience. This involves determining exactly which platforms the target audience is interacting with and when.

A single channel approach is often not sufficient to give marketers a holistic understanding of their audience, making it very challenging to create more comprehensive and personalized customer experiences. However, with cross-channel marketing, marketers can consider every touchpoint, allowing them to optimise their message along every step as consumers interact with their brands.

What exactly is cross-channel marketing?

Cross-channel marketing involves a combination of different marketing channels to develop a more cohesive customer journey for a target audience. With cross-channel marketing, brands can keep up with the desires of their customers more easily.

What are the fundamentals of cross-channel marketing?

The goal of cross-channel marketing is to offer more personalised and engaging customer experiences. For marketers, there are a few best practices or fundamentals to consider when crafting a cross-channel campaign:

• Integrating an objective setting

Ensuring that marketers are translating business objectives into actual marketing objectives and digital KPIs is very important. This ensures strategies are well-defined and a clear framework for communicating how strategies and chosen channels can impact wider business objectives is established.

• Making use of data-driven decision-making

To create a successful campaign, businesses must be data driven. They must consider exactly who their target audience is, what platforms they use most, and what type of messaging they respond to. Quality data gathered from several channels identifies trends and patterns in behaviour that can be utilised to contextualise an audience’s unique preferences and decisions.

• Identifying buyer personas

Having clearly defined buyer personas is a necessity. This information assists marketers to decide on which channels they should focus their efforts on and what kind of tone and messaging to implement.

• Choosing channels 

Depending on the buyer persona and unique business goals, there may be some channels that make more sense than others. Marketers should start with those and can expand to include other channels as they see increased success.

• Measuring outcomes

By using multiple channels, marketers must carefully measure the results of their multi-channel strategies. Using analytics will inform them as to which channels are effective, which channels impacted other channels, and which channels can be eliminated from their efforts.

Ultimately, the goal of cross-channel digital marketing must be to step beyond just being present on multiple channels and start connecting them all into one, successful, multi-channel approach to marketing.