You have probably heard the term multi-channel marketing before. Do you know it means? Do you know why it’s important to understand?

Multi-channel marketing is jargon that most non-marketers don’t understand. Simply put, multichannel marketing is getting the message out about your products and services through many methods. The goal of multi-channel marketing is to get the information into the hands of as many of your audience as possible. How many channels you use will depend on the ways in which you sell your products as well as where your audience is located.

The different ways you can market and sell products today include:

• Retail
• Website
• Social media
• Mobile commerce
• Call centers
• Catalogs (online and offline)

What are the benefits of multichannel marketing?

The benefits of multichannel marketing are many, the main one being that your audience can interact with and buy from you in several ways depending on where they are when they choose to buy. In order to take advantage of the many ways to sell something, it’s important that you tell your consumer through many different ways, as well as sell to them in many different ways.

Getting the message to your audience requires a multi-pronged effort using various marketing channels.

You may want to use a combination of:

• Mobile advertising
• Website advertising
• Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)
• Content marketing (SEM)
• Newsletter ads
• Social Media ads
• Email marketing
• TV ads
• Print ads

What does the multi-channel process look like?

For example, the process might look like this:

A lead sees a PPC advertisement on Facebook regarding a free webinar that you’re having in the next seven days on a topic they’re interested in. They click-through and sign up for the free webinar. This triggers your email marketing software to send them pre-formatted emails and created information on a periodic basis, as well as signs them up to come to the free webinar.

Via email they learn about all the different products you offer, and a gentle reminder to attend the webinar. At the webinar they listen to the information you promised and are given a link to buy the promotional items you mention in the webinar. They click-through to buy, and are then prompted to give more information such as their snail mail address, email address or whatever other information you’d like to be able to contact them through.

Each step pushes/pulls your lead, then customer, through your product funnel – one thing leading to the next, one channel at a time.

But, you have other entry points too, not just the Facebook advertisement. You keep your blog populated with regular and informative articles and information about your niche in which the calls to action point to your products and/or services and, of course, prompts them to sign up for your email newsletter.

In addition, perhaps you guest blog post regularly too. The link within your bio at the end of the blog posts points your audience to more information.

Each thing works with the other and independently as well, thus forming many different channels that all lead to the same or variations of the information you want your audience to know about.

And that my friend, is multichannel marketing.

Ciao,
Miss Kemya