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How to measure a multi-channel marketing strategy

Multi-channel marketing can be a great opportunity for your company’s success, but what’s the best way to measure its success across the different channels?

Multi-channel marketing can be a great opportunity for your company’s success, but what’s the best way to measure its success across the different channels?

It’s not enough nowadays to promote your brand in one channel if you want to maximize your brand’s exposure. Marketers know that a successful digital strategy involves a combined use of multiple channels to reach the target audience.

Multi-channel marketing can bring new opportunities for your company, but you also need to be able to measure its performance. What’s the best way to analyze your efforts across all channels?

The power of multi-channel marketing

What makes multi-channel marketing powerful is the ability to optimize your strategy depending on the most successful channels for your company. As users spend more time across different channels, marketing has to be agile enough to reach the target audience across multiple destinations.

For example, if you want to increase your email subscribers, you don’t just rely on your email marketing strategy anymore. You can also create a valuable piece of content to build your email database as part of lead generation. You can share the content on social, while you can also create ads to reach more people.

You can even promote this content on your site with a blog post or to mention it on your next webinar. Thus, you split your efforts across different channels and strategies to ensure that you maximise the chances of achieving your goal.

Multi-channel marketing reminds us that the sales funnel is not necessarily linear anymore and this means that a marketing strategy should involve all the different paths that can lead to the desired goals.

As people use a growing number of channels on a daily basis, there comes a challenge for marketers who want to understand where their target audience is. The best way to reach them is to follow their online habits to deliver the right message at the right channel.

This brings the challenge of analysing a multi-channel marketing strategy and the signals that tell if it’s successful.

How to measure your multi-channel marketing strategy

A common misconception when starting with multi-channel marketing is that you need to follow the same approach in the measurement that you’d follow with just one channel.

This can lead to the wrong observations, as not every channel has the same objectives or metrics.

What’s the best way to measure a multi-channel marketing strategy?

Here are five steps to make it easier for you.

Define ROI

It’s useful to start by setting your objectives at an early point. Discuss with your team what you want to achieve and how you can define ROI. Different objectives can lead to different metrics.

Thus, if you’re focusing on awareness, you’ll be using different metrics than the a marketing team that focuses more on conversion.

You can set up holistic objectives for all your marketing activities but you can also narrow down your goals to each channel to ensure that you’re measuring your efforts at every level. This way you’re able to tell which channel is more successful, but also if your complete marketing strategy is achieving the set objectives.

What’s important in a multi-channel marketing strategy is to showcase how all the channels you’re using are contributing to meeting your objectives.

How can you justify that each channel you’re using is making it easier to reach your targets?

Focus on attribution

Marketing attribution can help you find all the touchpoints that contributed to a successful performance.

The right attribution model for your strategy can help you understand each channel’s success without necessarily relying on the last channel that helped you reach your goal. This can be extremely useful for a multi-channel strategy as you are able to attribute the credits to every channel that played a key part in meeting your goals.

Every channel in the funnel can contribute to your objectives and attribution is making it easier than ever to discover the best performing touchpoints.

For example, if you want to increase the sales of your product by adding value, you can create a path that starts from your social posts, guiding the users to your blog post and involving a call-to-action that brings readers to your features page.

This can be more successful than simply promoting your product’s page as it manages to add the right context to each action. Thus, attribution could be equally split in each step and touchpoint to ensure that all channels have played an important role in increasing the conversion rate.

Use marketing technology as your ally

The best way to measure the success of a campaign is to use the right technology that will help you explore the best-performing channels. As a marketing strategy involves more channels nowadays, it’s crucial to use the best technology that will make the analysis of your efforts as easy as possible.

The explosive growth of the martech landscape has brought new opportunities in making the most of technology to boost marketing and sales.

A platform that blends all your marketing activities in one place can make it easier to keep track of the best performing channels. It can also help you to spot new opportunities that you otherwise may have missed.

Moreover, marketing technologies help you towards applying a data-centric mindset that can boost your strategy and your future campaigns.

Keep a close eye on data

It’s more common than ever for marketers to be data-centric as the growing number of channels asks for a closer eye on data to analyze the success of your work.

A focus on data along with the use of martech can help you become more efficient while A/B testing and optimization can be justified through the right evidence.

The right use of data can help you understand in a multi-channel marketing strategy:

  • The best-performing channels
  • The channels with the highest ROI
  • How each channel contributes to a specific goal
  • The best-converting channels
  • How your target audience responds to your marketing efforts on each channel

There are many ways to use your data to create more successful strategies and as we have predicted, it’s a trend that is not expected to go away anytime soon.

Put everything together to measure your marketing impact

It’s not enough to analyze how each channel performs individually towards your marketing goals. You need to be able to showcase how all your efforts are combined to measure your wider marketing impact.

This is the stage that you showcase how all your marketing activities contribute towards the sales funnel and the wider revenue. Even if these are not your direct targets, it’s still important to have an idea of where you are towards the bigger business goals.

This step can also go back to attribution and how all touchpoints are part of the funnel to help you meet your goals.

During this step, you need to be able to present a holistic overview of all the channels you’ve involved in your marketing strategy, this time focusing on how all of them combined have helped you create a successful marketing activity.

Overview

It may seem hard to measure a multi-channel marketing strategy, but it doesn’t have to be a struggle for you. All you need is the right focus on data, technology, and attribution to measure how each channel performed and how you can add up your efforts in one bigger marketing impact.

Here’s an overview of our tips on how to improve the measurement of your multi-channel marketing:

  • Set your objectives early
  • Decide on your metrics
  • Decide on the best channels that will help you reach your goals
  • Measure the success of each channel individually
  • Involve the right attribution strategy that makes it easier to measure your efforts
  • Use marketing technology platforms to involve all measurement in one place
  • Keep an eye on the complete funnel and focus on data that will make your strategy even more successful
  • Don’t forget to measure all your activities together to analyze your marketing impact and how it contributes to your business goals

 

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