Are you trying to build customer engagement and brand loyalty?
It’s becoming increasingly difficult with customers using multiple channels, including mobile apps and the web. The world of media is changing at an unprecedented rate. Technology is disrupting established business models for advertising and customers are changing the ways in which they consume information. Customers now choose exactly how and when they interact with a brand – be it Internet, TV, radio, mobile, or print. They need to be reached with consistent messaging across all of these touch points.
Marketing messages now need to take into account how different audience segments interact with content across different media. Digital technologies have splintered media into numerous niches, channels and segments today. To succeed you need to develop a cohesive multi-channel marketing strategy. But just tacking on a channel doesn’t make your marketing strategy ‘multi-channel’. In fact, a disconnected multichannel marketing strategy can do more to hamper customer engagement and loyalty than to build and maintain it. Worse, poor cross-channel marketing can send frustrated customers into competitors’ waiting arms.
Below are nine multichannel marketing trends to help you prepare a successful multi-channel marketing strategy for the year ahead.
1. Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM)
- The big multichannel marketing trend is the renaissance of CRM. No longer is this limited to paper-based mail programs, but sophisticated data-driven programs that integrate tailored content across multiple channels. The challenge for many businesses is how to evolve from a transactional view of the customer to a behavioural view to improve the customer experience, as well as build and maintain customer loyalty.
- Create and maintain a single view of your customer. This is a critical strategy because today’s customers often interact with your brand in a variety of ways that involve more than one touch point. It is vital that you understand how your customers behave across all channels, at each and every touch point, and that you also understand each customer’s value to you. To get that single customer view, consolidate all customer data in one place regardless of source.
- Start to build rich customer profiles to encapsulate your customers’ needs, behaviours, and ways they want to interact. Personalise your customers’ journey by delivering relevant experiences based on what you know about your customer. When you focus on delivering content in context, you get to the real objective, which is maximizing engagement, revenue, and, hopefully, lifetime value.
2. Better Data
- As marketing programs become increasingly multi channel, businesses need to invest in the right technology to manage customers’ preferences and permissions across every touch point, from an email to a mobile app to the point of sale. Think about the data you need to drive your marketing programs and make yourself relevant and timely. Turn your data into better, more actionable information that serves up relevant content.
- Look for a solution that not only ensures compliance with an ever broadening regulatory framework, but gives your customers a voice, enabling them to choose how, when, and where marketers communicate with them.
- Analytics offers a growth opportunity for today’s multichannel marketers to reach customers with the information they want most. However, businesses should focus less on acquiring additional analytics solutions and more on analysing the data they already have to create one message across all communication channels. Avoid ‘dashboard overload’ by focussing on the key metrics that drive your bottom line.
3. Content Marketing
- Regardless of platform, marketers must create stories people want to read. Use these three strategies to make a strong story:
a) Use a hook to pull readers in, tell a story, and deliver an ending worthy of the story build up.
b) Aim to create the best content you can each time to build your authority.
c) Make your content contagious. If you wouldn’t share it, why would someone else? - Tablets have changed the length of article consumed. Allow for long format content consumption which will supercharge your SEO.
- Context is king. Check out this video of Marc Bishop, director of global product marketing at LinkedIn, discussing the future of customer engagement and the importance of context when using social media.
4. Loyalty
- Businesses engender customer loyalty when they optimise the customer experience by being in tune with the customer’s need, and providing a level of personalisation that engages the customer at the right time and place.
- You need to actively and relevantly engage with customers throughout their path to purchase, to gain their loyalty and drive repurchase. Static one-size-fits-all campaigns and messaging strategies no longer work. And channel silos need to be broken down and reconnected in meaningful ways around the customer in real time.
- Design a better experience for your customers through customer journey mapping—a relatively new marketing discipline that combines touch point mapping with customer experience design and customer strategy.
5. Marketing Automation
- Marketing automation is a hot topic as more marketers are adopting the technology to generate more and better leads, improve marketing productivity, and increase conversion rates. The most frequently used ROI performance metrics are response metrics, including open rate, click through rate, and unsubscribes.
- The most important marketing automation features are lead nurturing, integration with CRM, social media and mobile platforms, and analytics & reporting capabilities. Some of the most popular marketing automation platforms are: Marketo, Oracle Eloqua,and Hubspot. Budget constraints, lack of skilled employees, and poor contact database quality are the three biggest obstacles to more effective use of marketing automation.
- The key benefits your business could receive from marketing automation include:
more and better leads
improved marketing productivity
higher conversion rates
6. Digital
- Digital channels often work best when they’re integrated with offline media and channels. Drive visitors to your website(s) using traditional media to reach out and engage customers. The next step is to interact with your site visitors and encourage them to take the next step when they initially reach your site or social network presence. It may mean finding out more about your company or its products, searching to find a product or reading a blog post.
- Define the conversion point for your business, eg for a multi channel retailer it will be an online or offline sales outcome. For other businesses, it could be where the visitor commits to form a relationship which will generate commercial value for the business such as a lead.
- Build your customer relationships over time through multiple interactions using different paid, owned and earned media touch points such as your website, social presence, email and direct interactions to boost customer lifetime value.
7. Social Media Diversity
- It is now essential for businesses to explore and establish their brands on multiple networks in order to attract their customers’ attention and business. Pinterest and Instagram have grown in popularity with businesses as a picture tells a thousand words. Articles that include an image can result in up to 94% more views. To greatly increase the chance of getting your customers’ attention, include a picture in your posts. You can also give your SEO a boost by using relevant alt and meta tags with each image.
- We predict Google+ and SlideShare will become popular players in 2014. Google+ is now the second largest social network with over 359 million monthly users, which is why for marketers are expected to take that to the next level and use Google+ and SlideShare as daily tools for content dissemination and social sharing.
8. Mobile & Location-based Content Marketing
- Mobile marketing is growing and customers increasingly use smartphones to find and engage with businesses. BUT don’t be mobile only because the world is multi-screen. Follow where your customers want to go. The most important thing a mobile app can do is simplify your message down to a direct call-to-action and make that action as easy as possible to act on.
- Location Intelligence is the missing piece in the big data puzzle. When you are able to combine customer preference data, with social media insights, geo-demographic profiles of where a customer lives and where they are at this very moment there is an unparalleled opportunity to engage that customer with a relevant message – when and where it is most meaningful.
- Location Intelligence will help more and more businesses reach out to customers with highly targeted offers. GPS-enabled smartphones now make it possible to not only know where customers live and work, but also where they are at any time. This information unlocks new ways to interact in a relevant and meaningful way with customers that are near retail outlets or inside a ‘geofence’.
9. Measurable Marketing Results
- To understand if your multi channel marketing campaign is worth the investment, you need to measure the difference it actually makes to your bottom line.
- The success of any particular channel cannot be viewed in isolation. To uncover the true performance of each channel ongoing analysis of actual user behaviour is essential.
- Analysis of all multi channel marketing activity should answer the age-old question, ‘Is it worth it?’ This can be achieved through extensive A/B testing and by comparing the difference between paths to conversion, where users have taken advantage of marketing offers and where they haven’t.
Businesses must plan for today’s dynamic environment. With 72% of consumers wanting to be engaged in an integrated marketing fashion*, the time is right to break down your channel silos. Use a deeper knowledge of your customers to transform multi channel campaigns to conversations. Data insights will maximise customer engagement, revenue, and customer lifetime value.
At MAXEMUS we combine strategy, data, technology and creativity to help you get, keep and grow your most valuable asset. Your customers.
To improve your customer engagement and brand loyatly, contact us now for a complimentary phone consultation.