Lead generation is the process of collecting potential customers’ information through a form on the internet. Generating leads from multiple channels has now become a basic necessity for all businesses that indulge in online marketing.
With potential customers scattered across multiple websites and platforms, businesses must make efforts to widen their reach so that no leads are overlooked. This can be done through cross channel marketing. Thus, business owners must know what cross channel marketing is and why it is essential to a lead generation strategy.
What is Cross Channel Marketing?
Cross channel marketing is the strategy of reaching customers through various channels, both online and offline. Some of these channels may include email, text messages, internet sites, physical stores, call centers, mobile phones, apps, etc.
It aims to acquire new customers from various platforms and start a channel of communication with them that would be followed through the entire customer life cycle. Brands can also integrate an omnichannel contact center to keep in touch with customers and provide support whenever needed.
While engaging with customers to secure purchases, businesses need to work simultaneously across various channels so that their message is consistent across multiple touchpoints. Yet, a personalized customer experience must be provided to ensure loyalty and retention.
6 Reasons Why Cross Channel Marketing is Essential to Your Lead Generation Strategy
Now, in an ideal world, you could have excelled by gathering leads from one channel. However, with increasing competition, every business must evolve its marketing strategy to include cross channel synergy. Ensuring this is essential to your lead generation strategy because of several reasons.
1. Changing purchasing pattern
The purchasing patterns of customers have evolved over the years to suit the market and changing technologies. Generation changes and a shift in their needs and wants have contributed significantly to changes in buyer behavior.
For instance, Gen Z comes across product ads on social media and emails, as opposed to the previous generation, whose primary reference would be physical hoardings, newspapers, etc. These dynamics seek a change in marketing strategies, including product design, distribution, messaging, and lead engagement.
This is because customers can now research extensively before buying a product or service. They are also approached by your competitors. Hence, your strategy must be engaging, real, and profitable to succeed.
Some changes in purchasing patterns of customers include:
- Increase reliance on digital platforms
- Changes in work patterns, leading to more time spent on the internet than on the road
- Inclination toward online shopping
- Higher priority to health and wellness
- Familiarity with global trends and styles
For instance, Gen Z comes across product ads on social media and emails, as opposed to the previous generation, whose primary reference would be physical hoardings, newspapers, etc. These dynamics seek a change in marketing strategies, including product design, distribution, messaging, and lead engagement.
This is because primary buyers, who are now Gen Z and millennials, prefer to research extensively about a brand before buying a product or service. Along with personalized product offerings, the content that a brand projects, plays a crucial role in this stage.
One of the best ways to offer personalization to customers is to have a customized content strategy in place. Anshul Motwani, CEO at Wittypen, a content marketing platform that provides content creation and management services through a remote community of hundreds of freelance content writers, stresses the importance of customized content strategies for a better user experience. “A dedicated, personalized content strategy for each channel with integration possibility led to perfect cross channel experience for users,” he states.
Hence, you must create quality content across all channels that will help your customer make a buying decision and thus secure a lead for your business. Brands like KFC and Pizza Hut have multiple ways of reaching customers. They have active social media pages to ensure regular engagement, as well as email and SMS marketing strategies for leads.
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2. Need for 360-degree view of customer
Having a 360-degree view of a customer simply means that you have control over the customer’s journey through the entire sales life cycle. It provides a unified image of your buyer during brand engagement.
With a holistic view, you can tailor marketing campaigns and offer personalized solutions to attract leads. A single analytics platform can help you achieve this by connecting and visualizing customer behavior across multiple channels.
A 360-degree view of the customer can be achieved by:
- Understanding their needs and preferences
- Recognizing which platform your customer is more active on
- Fine-tuning the capabilities of each channel to serve the customer better
- Performing regular analysis and audits of existing campaigns
- Improving customer interaction strategies based on previous results
Cross channel marketing presents a holistic buyer persona, irrespective of the platform.
For instance, your searches and engagement on a website like LinkedIn can be vastly different from your activities on, say, Instagram. It is by recognizing the pattern of both behaviors can a business understand its true buyer persona.
3. Customers’ personalization needs
Even though sales interactions have largely moved to the digital space, customers still prefer a personalized experience. Studies say that brands with superior customer experience generate 5.7 times more revenue than competitors that lack in that area.
In fact, 73% of customers have said that a positive experience is one of the most important factors in brand loyalty. Most customers prefer brands that provide customized offers and recommendations.
To ensure a personalized experience, brands can follow these tips.
- Customers like to be addressed as individuals, whether you are talking to them directly or sending them an email or SMS. Do not generalize them in your interactions.
- Use artificial intelligence to create personalized offers by sifting through massive amounts of data and finding the right deals for customers.
- Make sure all your touchpoints present a unified brand message across channels.
4. Greater customer loyalty
Cross channel marketing leads to an improved brand experience, which leads to higher satisfaction among customers. And happy customers are more likely to return for further purchases.
Buyers often choose providers with whom they have a working relationship. Even if that provider charges a little extra or offers an alternative product because they do not have the preferred one, many customers would rather agree than find another business. This saves them from undergoing the tedious process of research, testing, and trying their luck elsewhere.
Thus, you must focus on building trust with customers so that they remain loyal to your brand. This can be done by keeping the benefits of the customer at the center of the marketing strategy.
5. Cross channel integration for efficiency
Cross channel integration refers to the process of integrating different marketing channels to track the journey of the customer on all channels and get a complete view of their behavior and purchase patterns.
By integrating channels like eCommerce websites, mobile retailers, and physical stores, you can access several customer touchpoints to ensure positive interactions and proper lead tracking. The same customer can be approached on other channels to complete the sale.
This also ensures that your customer interactions across channels are not independent of each other. For instance, if a customer has already bought a Prime membership for Amazon and keeps seeing the same ads to activate membership, it will be a futile effort.
Instead, the newly onboarded customer should be shown updated prices and offerings. Failure to gain a complete view of the customer’s journey leads to lost leads and missed opportunities.
6. Proven ROI
Cross channel marketing helps increase the return on investment (ROI) of a business by breaking down silos and opening a transparent channel to analyze performance metrics. Implementing an omnichannel lead generation system has proven to be very beneficial for businesses. This is how it works.
- A cross channel approach makes it easier to track leads and determine through which channel the customer approached the business.
- This leads to better tracking of campaign performances and identification of weak spots.
- Companies can map out various touchpoints and their effectiveness in converting leads to customers.
- As opposed to single-channel or multi-channel approaches, cross channel marketing provides accurate metrics that help in effective analysis.
- Such insights help to modify and optimize marketing campaigns by eliminating ineffective strategies and focusing on high-performing ones.
This is all about how external systems and channels work effectively in sync for lead generation and sales. One should also make sure to do lead quality checks. Simultaneously with b2b prospecting, one team must perform a lead vetting process to remove junk leads which have no value.
Now is the time to implement cross channel marketing and boost your lead generation strategy.
Cross Channel Marketing Examples
Several businesses have leveraged the benefits of cross channel marketing to become success stories for their industry.
1. M&M’s
The candy brand M&M’s employed a brilliant cross channel strategy during Super Bowl LV and became a rage by combining traditional and modern marketing techniques for maximum impact.
- First, the brand aired a TV ad during Super Bowl LV and hyped it on social media. Titled “Come Together”, the ad starred the American actor and writer Dan Levy and featured people apologizing for their social faux pas.
- Teasers were shared on social media before, during, and after the game.
- Followers were invited on a Zoom call with an M&M’s character, Yellow, to watch the ad.
- Several hashtags were created for this campaign and promoted on social media.
- Followers were encouraged to use the hashtags and the brand shared the ad reactions as well.
Thus, by combining TV and social media, M&M’s created a huge buzz during one of the most popular events of the year.
2. Rebecca minkoff
Fashion brand Rebecca Minkoff combined the physical and digital shopping world to create a unique customer experience. Their cross-channel marketing ideas connected multiple channels to integrate the in-store and online shopping experiences.
They added interactive screens in their stores to provide product information. These screens could send relevant information to customers’ phones for the next purchase steps. Customers could also save clothes they tried in the store and buy them online later.
This helped to reach shoppers on the platform of their convenience. As a result of this strategy, Rebecca Minkoff saw a 6-7x increase in their readymade garments sales over a period of 5-6 months.
3. Land rover
Luxury vehicle brand Land Rover created a superior brand experience by leveraging Google mediums like the Google Display Network, Masthead in Lightbox YouTube ads, Google+, etc. Additionally, TV ads were also launched for campaigns like “Bred for Adventure.”
This helped to increase its visibility on popular networks and reach customers on Google, via television, and through influencers by creating visual blog content. Images from trips to picturesque places were also added on the Land Rover site for more impact.
This cross-channel campaign generated 100 million impressions on YouTube, 11 million on the masthead in Lightbox, and a 10% increase in search ad CTR, which are significant numbers.
Closing Thoughts on Why Cross Channel Marketing is Essential to your Lead Generation Strategy
The cross channel approach helps the sales and marketing teams to create better strategies and analyze campaign responses correctly. Unifying customer data makes business operations easier and leads tracking more effective. Through these valuable insights, you can also improve customer service efforts and provide a wholesome customer experience for better brand reputation.
Growth Hackers is an award-winning digital marketing and growth hacking agency helping businesses from all over the world grow. There is no fluff with Growth Hackers. We help entrepreneurs and business owners implement cross channel marketing, generate qualified leads, optimize their conversion rate, gather and analyze data analytics, acquire and retain users and increase sales. We go further than brand awareness and exposure. We make sure that the strategies we implement move the needle so your business grow, strive and succeed. If you too want your business to reach new heights, contact Growth Hackers today so we can discuss about your brand and create a custom growth plan for you. You’re just one click away to skyrocket your business.
