B2B buyers use over ten or more channels to interact with brands daily. So, it makes sense for brands like yours to adopt a multichannel marketing approach to cater to them. Besides, such an approach also helps you reach out to more customers, improving the chances of successful conversions.
But a multichannel marketing approach must be backed by a solid strategy to be effective. And building one is often easier said than done.
This blog covers the benefits of a multichannel marketing strategy and tips to help you improve its effectiveness. Let’s get right into it.
Why do You Need a Good Multichannel Marketing Strategy?
Yes, a good multichannel marketing strategy helps you connect with customers right where they are, but it also helps you collect better-quality customer data. You can gain customer insights from their behavior across different channels and develop targeted marketing approaches on its basis. But that’s not all. A good multichannel marketing strategy also helps you decide on the following:
- Which channels to use
- Whom to target
- And how to target them effectively.
This includes allocating a sufficient marketing budget and determining outreach approaches. But, 71% of senior B2B marketers still routinely struggle with it, according to reports.
Fortunately, one can build an effective B2B multichannel strategy by following five simple steps. Read on to find out.
How to Improve the Effectiveness of your B2B Multichannel Strategy in Five Steps
1. Set Clear Goals
One might wrongly believe that building a successful multichannel marketing approach starts with a multichannel strategy analysis. But it begins with setting clear goals first. And you can start outlining your goals by simply answering the following questions.
- Does your business have customers using different channels?
- Will a multichannel approach be effective in marketing to these customers?
- What are the broad goals you want to achieve through multichannel marketing? Do you want to increase brand awareness or better customer retention?
Answers to the above questions will give direction to your marketing strategy.
Once you know why your company needs a multichannel approach, it’s time to create campaign-specific goals. These are meant to be short-term, achievable and measurable and will help you determine if your current marketing approach is effective or if you need to make changes to your approach to get better results. For instance, increasing the number of MQLs or marketing qualified leads by 30% every month is a campaign-specific goal which is readily trackable.
2. Determine Your Target Audience
Studies show that 66% of customers expect brands to understand their needs and expectations today. And while meeting prospects right where they are is hard in a single-channel marketing approach, it is trickier in a multichannel approach.
That’s because your prospects exist across different channels and use channels differently. So, marketing to a C-suite executive on LinkedIn will require a different approach to marketing to C-suite executives on Twitter.
Fortunately, you can create buyer personas that focus on small sections of your target audience and develop marketing approaches specifically for them. For this, you must ensure that your buyer profiles include the channels they frequent, the buyer behavior, and the demographic information.
Next, check if your buyer personas are accurate by running small-scale marketing campaigns for these individual personas. This will help you determine if you need to update or tweak them for marketing.
3. Identify the Appropriate Channels
Your buyers will be available on multiple platforms at the same time. But you must choose which channels to connect with them. This will ensure you don’t exceed your allocated budget and don’t overwhelm your marketing team.
Keep in mind that your buyer personas should give you a clear idea about which channels your buyers frequent and for what. You can identify popular marketing platforms on their basis.
For instance, you could identify that 80% of your buyers are active on LinkedIn, 50% are active over emails, and 30% are active on other social platforms. With this information, you could focus your marketing efforts on LinkedIn and emails alone.
4. Develop Messaging for Different Channels
The next step in multichannel marketing implementation is developing appropriate messaging for personas across different channels. You must ensure your messaging style is cohesive yet meets your prospects at their customer journey stage.
For instance, if your prospects use LinkedIn during the awareness stage and use blog posts during the consideration stage, you could develop different content on both platforms. Whereas, if your prospects consume similar content on multiple platforms, you could repurpose the content. This could mean shortening the length of the content, switching up the hook, and more.
Doing this will ensure that all your content aligns with the information shared on the platform. Moreover, it will be easily discoverable and more likely to be interacted with too.
5. Integrate Content Across Different Channels
While the above step focuses on developing content catering to audiences on different platforms, this step ensures that all the content is cohesive, furthers brand awareness and drives customer action.
Check your content over different platforms and ensure the messaging is proper before the campaign goes live. For instance, if your brand is holding a New Years’ sale, the last thing you want is a LinkedIn Ad promoting a Christmas Sale. Alternatively, you can use a single publishing platform for your campaigns and view the posts set to go live on different platforms beforehand.
Track results
The last and perhaps most important step of developing a B2B multichannel strategy in 2023 is frequently tracking campaign metrics. This is the only way to know if your current strategy is effective.
So, if the goal of your campaign was to boost customer conversions through multichannel marketing, you should track the number of sales-qualified leads generated over a quarter. This will tell you if your current approach is effective or if you need to tweak it to get more conversions.
