If you’re to succeed in the modern world, you need a combination of tools all working in harmony to promote and support the business. Unfortunately, no other structure will work in 2022. If your channels aren’t integrated, the customer experience suffers, and people will choose to buy from other brands instead of yours.
As a customer of any brand yourself, you want to enjoy a cohesive and integrated experience across all the different channels rather than a fragmented one. Well, the same is true for your customers and brand.
In this guide, we want to address some of the biggest talking points in the cross-channel marketing niche. How are Australian businesses adopting the strategy? What is the customer data telling us? How can you improve your strategy as the year goes on?
Social is Key
In other news, water is wet. It might sound obvious, but not enough businesses prioritize the social aspect of their cross-channel marketing strategy. Sadly, they think that social media platforms look after themselves and take their following that they build on them for granted. In reality, social media is where you’re likely to generate a healthy return on your investment.
Here are just some of the problems that businesses tend to experience with social media:
This year, you need to find new ways to integrate all social channels into the wider cross-channel strategy.
Accountability is Lacking
Even in 2022, there’s also still lots of confusion surrounding accountability when it comes to the cross-channel strategy. According to a recent report, around 70% of respondents said that the marketing team was responsible and accountable for cross-channel marketing. Yet less than 40% of respondents said that the marketing team was integrated into the strategy.
Once again, the issue of silos in marketing rears its ugly head. Businesses are aware of the issues that silos bring, but they don’t seem intent on fixing them. Every year, cross-channel marketing leads to silos in processes, behaviors, activity, and the whole organization. Whenever silos occur, cross-channel marketing can never reach its full potential.
Mobile is Behind
Elsewhere, another common trend in the cross-channel marketing niche is that businesses still aren’t utilizing mobile enough. When it comes to channel usage, mobile channels are still relatively low. When businesses build a cross-channel strategy, they just aren’t including mobile channels. This seems crazy considering the increase in mobile activity since the pandemic; as people work from home, their mobile devices are constantly next to them on the sofa or desk.
Every day, customers use their mobile devices to find products of your type. Whether through a YouTube video, Google search, or another route, consumers are using their mobile devices as they go through the buying journey. Knowing this, it seems ludicrous that businesses in Australia and New Zealand continue to ignore this channel in their cross-channel marketing strategies.
Post-Campaign is Forgotten
Next, we’ve found that most businesses launch their campaigns and then move on to the next thing. While we appreciate that you have lots of items on the to-do list, you cannot afford to ignore post-campaign steps. What does this mean? Analyzing your campaigns, adjusting them to meet your audience’s needs, and learning more about both your campaign and the audience.
If you think about a marketing campaign, it’s hard to ignore the challenges of planning and designing the ad. According to a recent survey, 73% of respondents said that these were the areas that consumed the most time during the marketing process. However, just 5% of people said that they spent the most time on the following:
To break down this scary statistic further, only 1% of people in the survey said that they spent the most time optimizing their ads. If you aren’t analyzing performance and optimizing campaigns, your ads will never fulfill their destiny. The big dreams that you have for campaigns will fall by the wayside.
Even in 2022 with all the data and tools available, no business ever creates the perfect ad at the first attempt. It takes time to optimize targeting, bidding, budgeting, and various other factors. Even if you enjoy success in the opening weeks, you’ll still need to optimize to ensure that this success isn’t just a fluke.
We know that many businesses will read this observation and say that they don’t have time to optimize campaigns. To this, we say that you don’t need time…you need the right tool. On the corner where automation and artificial intelligence meet, you’ll find a leading tool called Trapica, and this is one of the best examples of useful tools for this niche. Trapica uses machine learning and AI to monitor your ad campaigns (across all your important channels) and optimize bidding, budgeting, targeting, and A/B testing. Without too much work, your campaigns continually improve and add value to the business.
With a tool like Trapica, you improve cross-channel marketing without the hard work that once came with it. In truth, this is one of the easiest problems in this guide to fix because one tool does everything for you.
Measurement is Ignored
Finally, we’re going to widen this trend to the whole strategy. Not measuring your ad campaigns is one thing, but not measuring your cross-channel approach is another problem altogether. If you’re to implement a cross-channel strategy, you need to measure performance and learn about the factors that do and don’t work. Using another survey, around 50% of companies recently admitted to having no system to measure between their different online channels.
Just as we’ve seen before, companies sometimes measure their channels in isolation but not the interaction between them. What’s more, only one in five respondents had a system to measure between offline and online channels.
You might think, ‘we have a system and we’re always analyzing the efficacy of our cross-channel approach’. Unfortunately, looking at revenue and sales alone are not good indicators of performance. Instead, you need to dig deeper to learn whether all channels are pulling their weight within the strategy. Soon enough, you might learn that one channel isn’t contributing as much as the others. Depending on your flexibility, you’ll then replace this channel with another.
Without measurement, poorly-performing channels and the whole strategy could be crumbling without you even realizing it. Why invest anything into this practice if you aren’t going to stay on top of it?
Tips to Master Cross-Channel Marketing in Australia
We’ve been quite negative in this guide so far, but it’s important information because you could make one (or several) of these mistakes with your cross-channel marketing approach. Let’s brighten the tone and talk about things that you SHOULD be doing with your cross-channel marketing strategy this year!
Get Help from Tools
Unsurprisingly, the first tip we have is to enlist the help of AI and other tools. Earlier, we discussed Trapica and this platform has plenty of value to offer right across the cross-channel marketing field. As well as ad optimization, this includes audience discovery, performance monitoring, and ad account protection.
Suddenly, with the help of one AI tool, ad optimization is automated, and you learn more about your audience (critical for the success of cross-channel marketing). After learning about your audience, it’s possible to build a marketing persona and choose the right channels from the start.
Choose the Right Channels
Which channels should you choose? Often, people type this sort of question into Google and expect to see a list of channels that make the perfect strategy. Of course, it’s impossible for you to find an answer online because it all depends on your audience. What channels do they use? Where can they be found online and offline? These have always been the most important questions in the world of marketing, and they always will be. Once you answer them, the best channels will make themselves clear.
If possible, choose channels that complement one another to make your life easier.
Consider the Buyer Journey
When learning about your audience, consider the path that customers take as they go from strangers to loyal advocates of the brand. What channels do they interact with? How can you meet their needs at each stage?
Bonus Tips
Investing in cross-channel marketing is just the start, investing cleverly is the next step. You can do it with the advice in this guide!
