Challenges Of Multi-Channel Marketing
In today’s busy market of all kinds of products and services, a great content marketing strategy demands to focus on the most important thing: the customer. They gather information from smartphones and tablets, rather than the billboards and TVs of the past. This is why it is now more crucial than ever to make use of multi-channel marketing to reach the right customers on the right channels.
However, many of us struggle to create an effective multi-channel approach and the results never get to see their full potential. Below, we discuss the challenges behind content distribution and multi-channel marketing.
What is Multi-Channel Marketing?
On average, an adult will use around four connected devices to go on the web. Multi-channel marketing allows business owners and companies to keep in touch with customers through the use of various platforms or channels, such as:
- Websites
- Social media
- Search engines
- Smartphones
- Videos
- Display ads
- And more
It also allows them to tailor their customers’ user experience while creating personalized marketing strategies. When executed right, multi-channel interactions can boost your brand — and content distribution becomes much easier.
The Challenges it Presents
Every business owner wants their business to grow and earn a profit but nobody wants to go through the growing pains that need to happen before reaching your goals. Investing in a multi-channel campaign will help your business to take off quickly but it also comes with several challenges that will hinder your progress. Here are some of the most common challenges you’ll face in multi-channel marketing as you work to scale your business:
Efficient Management
Because customers are everywhere, your company should always be present where they are. As such, marketers will need to consistently develop various touchpoints and campaigns that will cover various channels seamlessly, so that customers will find your brand trustworthy and accessible. Another huge challenge that business owners face when it comes to management is keeping up with their inventory, where they need to consider the following:
- Overselling and overstocking: Keeping too much on-hand inventory will cost more money but having too little will stop your business from serving new customers.
- A lack of insight: To succeed in multi-channel marketing, you will need to track, understand and use data to your advantage to better serve your customers and get better control over your inventory.
- Manual management: While manually managing your inventory might be easier to maintain if you only sold through your website and store, it can become ineffective when you add more channels.
- A lack of visibility: It can be hard to keep track of orders and sales if you don’t use multi-channel software.
Moreover, customers expect a high quality of service consistently, no matter which sales channel they order from. This means that every channel should have customer support ready to provide them with a positive online experience.
Proper Attribution
Every year, it becomes more and more difficult to know which campaigns or channels of touch points contribute to qualified sales and conversions. Knowing what triggers the customers’ response will allow you to determine whether or not your efforts are getting results. A bigger challenge in multichannel marketing is coordinating the exchange of data throughout all your channels.
This requires you to create a uniform database of your customers’ information as well as access to customer history. But this also means that there will be conflict in channels since customers have the chance to choose between the different sales channels. Such conflicts can then lead to a shift of profits and business from one particular channel to another.
The risk of this happening can become greater if one sales channel is significantly better than another.
Analytics
According to experts, here are a few statistics on analytics worth noting:
- 37% of marketers find it hard to use customer data to their advantage
- 55% of marketers find it hard to add customer data to their existing profiles
- 65% of marketers are concerned with the quality of data they have
These statistics are certainly worrying and would discourage any business that wishes to invest time and resources into a multi-channel campaign. However, these challenges suggest a lack of experience within the business rather than the marketing process itself. As such, marketers should undergo training to develop their skills or they can use analytic software to help simplify data analytics.
On the other hand, some marketing teams think that they already know the ins and outs of analytics. This is a mistake that should be avoided because it gets harder to do every day. As mentioned, customers can come and go through any channel as they please, so it becomes more difficult to tell which channel is the best at getting the job done.
Again, it’s best to use some funds for analytics and reporting to tell you about customer habits and interactions.
Innovation in Industry
These days, there are so many channels and choices for customers to pick from, which means that simply handing them a message isn’t enough. Everything needs to be tailored to the audience’s needs, and there are plenty of things to take into consideration, such as:
- Their preferences
- Demographics
- Transactions
- Current location
- And more
By engaging customers this way, you can be sure that they won’t just get your message, but will also listen and be willing to act no matter which channel.
The online market has exploded over the past few years, which is why multi-channel marketing is both dynamic and terrifying. You could become trendy, but be old and dated by next month. If you get it just right, then you’ll have a marketing campaign that runs well.
Learn to Leverage Multi-Channel Marketing
Content marketing is never easy and on some levels, it can be made harder by using multi-channel marketing. There are many challenges to this option, but there is also plenty of profit to be made if you get it right. With the right tools and knowledge, this strategy is bound to provide you with great and lasting results.
Sources:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/importance-challenges-multi-channel-marketing-manoj-gupta/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1094996805700657
https://www.optimove.com/blog/multi-channel-marketing
https://www.corefactors.in/blog/multi-channel-marketing-guide-challenges-strategies-and-tools/
https://www.sellbrite.com/blog/5-common-multi-channel-challenges-overcome/
https://www.marketingevolution.com/marketing-essentials/what-is-multi-channel-marketing
https://www.spiralytics.com/blog/digital-marketing-channels/
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/what-is-multi-channel-marketing-faqs-ht
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