When it comes to different marketing ways, you may already come across multi-channel and cross-channel marketing. Both are very different in the ways to approach them. If you are availing of digital marketing services for your brand right now, you must at least know about these two concepts. It is important how your chosen agency render these and leverages the latest tools to your brand’s benefit.
While multi-channel is something that everybody resorts to, cross-channel marketing is somehow new to the landscape. But it is now gaining a lot of attention and notion. In fact, cross-channel marketing comes with a lot of benefits like multi-channel, but that’s if you do it right.
For this blog, we will know what cross-channel marketing is, especially the seven cross-channel marketing mistakes that every contractor should avoid. Be aware of these common mistakes to get the most out of your strategies.
What is Cross-Channel Marketing?
Cross-channel marketing is again a marketing technique. It provides people (target prospects) with a consistent, personalized, and holistic experience across multiple marketing platforms. It is a strategic, and digital, and customer-focused approach that creates a cohesive client journey for your construction business’s target audience.
There are many benefits of cross-channel marketing, including:
- Better marketing insights
- Stronger construction brand
- Leverage your Local SEO efforts
- Increased social media engagement
While we cross-channel marketing trends to give you benefits at any stage, it still depends on how strategic you execute the entire process and, of course, avoiding some common mistakes.
Cross-Channel Marketing Mistakes You Have to Avoid and How
Here we list down some common mistakes that you must not commit in your cross-channel marketing process:
1. Not unifying your data
The foundation of marketing efforts is first to understand your target customers. So, when marketing across various channels, clearly defining your buyer persona is crucial. Because once you develop your buyer persona, you must enclose all your customer-related data.
Gather all the information you can get across the various tools you use to manage your customer data. The goal here is to develop a comprehensive collection of your customer touchpoints. In this way, no matter what customer data platform you rely on, the information you have gathered can empower you.
For instance, you can track URLs and website cookies your customers generate, directly linking their online activities to their profile. This can help you see the many emails they interact with, and among others. And if you send out social media campaigns, you can determine which ones resonate with your clients.
All this empowers you to give proper message and content to your target audience.
2. Delivering inconsistent messages
You may be surprised at the number of companies and marketers committing this mistake. Whether anyone is searching for your business via Google or Bing or seeing your company as they scroll through their Instagram and Facebook, you must keep the messaging consistent.
So, you should tweak your ad copies according to every platform. For the most part, the audience you are targeting on every platform is your subject and where they are at in their range. Another thing you should keep in mind is that you must not have a Google headline saying your services or products are 10% off first purchase, while Facebook says it is 15%.
Bottom line: Do not confuse your audience or even your current customers.
3. Not Complying with the Platform Trends
While creating a channel to interact with any user, moving from one platform to another, you should be adjusting your marketing word and standard approach specific to a certain platform. So, when a particular user is on Instagram, they would not like to see content similar or familiar to your Twitter channel.
No single method is being applied across all channels, and you need to be wary of that.
4. Running the same offers on every channel
Based on experience, you already know that being on Instagram differs from being on LinkedIn. Your target audience feels no different. Accept that if you can obtain bottom-funnel conversions like demo requests from Google but not from Facebook. What other conversion actions can you get benefit from for Facebook? Go for a lead gen form or a phone call. Perhaps you want to build a target audience and increase your brand’s awareness.
Always be in tune with the actions your target audience wants to take with every channel, not what you want them to take. So, kindly tailor your campaigns accordingly.
5. Having the same KPIs for every channel
With a cross-channel marketing strategy, every single channel must have its own KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and goals. For instance, click-through rates on Facebook will not be the same as on LinkedIn. And neither of these will be close to Twitter. The same thing can be said for your cost-per-conversion goals. If you only know that Facebook leads are of lower quality than LinkedIn, you may have a much lower acceptable CPA on Facebook.
Be sure to understand your performance goals for every channel and the total value that each channel generates and KPIs accordingly.
6. Being rigid with the budget
It is great to be organized, but in any month, one channel of yours can significantly under or over-perform its historical average. So if you are not adjusting and taking advantage of such trends, you are severely missing out. It is fine to say that you have a $50k budget and that you choose to run ads on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Search.
However, as the month goes on, it should be in your best interest to pay attention to how every channel is doing compared to its average, including how efficient they are when adding value against each other.
7. Making inconsistent retargeting audiences
You can build retargeting audiences on nearly every digital marketing channel you can target users on. However, know that this can differ from platform to platform, but you can cover the same ground. If you are using retargeting audiences to target past website visitors who have not purchased on one platform, you must be doing that across all of them for as long as the performance allows.
Even more importantly, if you are excluding users from the campaign on a platform, you must be doing it across all of them. This goes to the ad messaging section. So, if the users get messages on several platforms but not from others because they are excluded, being confused will be their first response.
8. Google Analytics is not used for tracking
Unless you only use one channel for your construction business, you will never know what’s driving your sales. If there has been an acknowledgment platform that was one hundred percent accurate, any founder will have instantly become a household name.
However, just because something is not perfect does not mean it is not crucial to success. Every platform now has its tracking functionality, which is great. The not-so-great part is that every platform will always claim more credit than the actual due. And it will not be in your best interest. For such reasons, having a third-party basis of truth for your cross-channel marketing is crucial.
9. Ignoring non-converters
While you always like all of your channels to drive direct conversions, that is not a reality. In many cases, multiple channels are involved in the user’s path to conversion, which is then the whole point of your cross-channel marketing. Therefore, it is essential to determine the role every channel plays and at which stage.
10. Lack of Optimization
A critical draw of cross-channel marketing is how you can effectively analyze how the strategies you implement affect another. And based on the feedback you obtain from your analysis, you can determine how to make it more effective immediately.
If you fail to create a system that can help you analyze daily, you will lose some valuable insights. Run experiments across the various channels to uncover possible tweaks you can make. It may include the following:
- Testing multiple locations to place CTAs and compare the results
- Conduct A/B testing to find ways to increase the performance.
- Adjust the traits by which you target your social media audience.
Your Best Agency Partner – ConstructionMarketing.io
Cross-channel marketing is simply for your brand promotion. And it is your goal to boost your brand in the best possible way. To make the most of your cross-channel marketing, consider partnering with us! At ConstructionMarketing.io, we have the right and fitting approach to help you achieve your desired results.
Our agency’s lifeblood is to focus on all the most important areas of growing your construction business. We always stay on top of the latest trends and keep our best interest to look after your cross-channel marketing efforts. We offer a range of online marketing services that boost your construction brand and strengthen your online presence in the marketing landscape:
- SEO
- Website design and development
- Google My Business
- Social Media Marketing
- Keyword Research
- Content Creation
Contact us today. Let’s reinforce and explore more of your cross-channel marketing strategy!