Convenience and strategic success don't always go together.
Strategically using multiple channels to reach customers is essential for businesses today, including small local businesses, because everyone's on the web and everyone's mobile. In the pre-Internet days, marketing channels typically included print, radio, and television. Those still play a role, but today there are so many more channels you can take advantage of, including but not limited to:
- PPC advertising
- E-commerce website
- Direct mail
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
- Mobile marketing
How Your Brand Benefits from Multichannel Marketing
Multichannel marketing is about being where your customers are, and you have some amazing tools for determining where that is these days. The idea is to ensure your customers can learn about you through their favorite medium, and in some cases make purchases from you via that medium. This could, for example, prompt you to augment brand awareness by building a mobile shopping app after determining that your customers spend more time on mobile than in a desktop environment.
Multichannel marketing also means you have more touch points with customers. Not only can you reach them in more places, you can collect data in most channels that helps you understand customers better, measure the success of brand awareness campaigns, and learn what types of advertising work best. And many of the newer channels, like social media advertising, have remarkably powerful audience targeting tools, so you can be confident your brand awareness efforts are reaching the people you most want to reach.
Making the Most of Multichannel Marketing
Consistency of brand awareness is important across channels, but that doesn't mean you simply take the same campaign and shoehorn it into every channel. For example, despite the fact that Facebook and Instagram advertising offer similar options and have the same parent company, your Facebook advertising campaign needs to be different from your Instagram advertising campaign.
Consistency is important, but cloning brand awareness campaigns across channels doesn't work well.
At the same time, however, you don't want your channels to become "siloes." Coordinating cross-promotional campaigns so that different channels complement each other is advisable. And it's important to take advantage of the analytics many of today's marketing channels offer. That means tracking results, setting control groups, doing A/B testing of ads, and generally learning the customer story your data is trying to tell. What channel is best for your brand awareness efforts? You probably have some idea, but you won't know for sure until you try several and measure the results.
Offline Channels Are Channels Too
With all the hullabaloo about mobile and social marketing, it's easy to forget that offline options can be powerful marketing channels too. Especially for local, bricks-and-mortar businesses that want to attract nearby customers, offline "channels" like community events can be a terrific brand awareness opportunity. You'd be amazed how well classic, simple brand awareness products like pinback buttons perform with in-person marketing scenarios.
Another brand awareness tactic that some companies have used to good advantage involves connecting offline and online channels. You could do this, for example, by posting and sharing photos and videos of local events, or creating Instagram "behind the scenes" stories that give customers a look into company operations. Don't neglect your offline marketing opportunities.
Build Brand Awareness by Being Where Your Customers Are
A strong brand awareness strategy today inevitably involves multichannel marketing. Success requires that you choose the right channels based on your target audiences and your campaign and overall business goals. The testing and analytics technology is available to help you quickly evaluate success and determine which channels are most productive for you. But at the same time, it's important for brand awareness to have offline aspects too, and to incorporate a consistent brand "story" across all your online and offline channels.
