But How Do You Actually Get There? Part 1

I like to quote or reference colleagues’ posts, articles and such, but this time I find myself quoting from a solicitation to a webinar! That’s because it summarizes one of the biggest challenges you face as a marketer…cross-channel integration. Hats off to “Direct Marketing News” who will not doubt put on an informative webinar.

Knowing what to do is a start but if you are a small to medium business, or a small department in a large company, with limited staff or technology, how do you implement what could be a complex eco-system?

Here’s the pitch:

“From search to social, customers are interacting with your brand across a variety of channels, most likely created by many different people, in many different departments. However, chances are your customer thinks of your brand as just one entity, purchasing across channels, oblivious to your internal structure and processes. Providing a consistent message and customer experience is critical, so savvy marketers are optimizing campaigns through automated marketing programs and integrated data strategies.”

Let’s deconstruct:

From search to social, customers are interacting with your brand across a variety of channels… Hopefully you have a search strategy and a Google Ad Words or Facebook Ad Words implementation to assist you at a minimum. If not, your web vendor will be able to assist you or hire a specialist because “being found” is essential to growing your business and growing your social foundation as well. One of the key mandates of multichannel marketing is to go where your customer lives.

Similarly, you have to offer your customer or visitors to your website an easy way to dialog with you how they prefer, usually its as simple as placing social media icons on your site.

As simplistic as it may sound, I’ve seen companies who omit that essential linkage and leave it up to the consumer to find their own way to the website. Remember that multichannel is also two-way.

Part 2…

Ann McCartan, DBMCatalyst