How to Build a Winning Multichannel Marketing Strategy

Want to build a successful multichannel marketing strategy? One that not only brings a steady stream of targeted shoppers but turns almost every potential customer into a fan? 

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Of course, you do. But there is a catch — it takes some serious planning. 

Building and executing a robust multichannel marketing plan requires just the right mix of

marketing channels, marketing automation, marketing effort, and marketing message. 

But when it’s done right, it’s marketing magic! 

In this post, we take you through the key steps you should take to build a high-performing multichannel marketing strategy. 

But first, for those newer or bootstrapping eCommerce marketers, let’s quickly recap what multichannel marketing is, how it’s different from omnichannel marketing, and what makes an excellent cross-channel marketing strategy. 

What Is Multichannel Marketing 

Multichannel marketing communicates with and engages your target audience through multiple platforms or channels. This enables you to build brand and product awareness and reach potential customers through a mix of media channels — including social media, email marketing, mobile apps, or even traditional marketing outlets like print and TV. 

Now widely used for online retail, this cross-channel marketing approach enables eCommerce marketers to meet potential and existing customers where they are — ultimately making it easier for brands to boost customer engagement and performance for less marketing effort. 

Sounds easy enough, right? 

But here’s the kicker: This isn’t a one-size-fits-all marketing message. An effective multichannel marketing strategy involves customizing the content to suit each single marketing channel and its specific characteristics, as well as to the user expectations of each platform and their preferences. 

In a nutshell, multichannel marketing amplifies your brand’s voice, extends your product reach, and ultimately drives better results by offering a more-tailored interaction for consumers across various platforms.

But this should not be confused with omnichannel marketing. 

How Is Multichannel Marketing Different from Omnichannel Marketing

Both multichannel and omnichannel marketing aim to engage customers through various platforms (multiple channels), but they approach customer engagement quite differently. While multichannel marketing focuses on marketing channels, omnichannel marketing focuses on the customer, ensuring all channels work together to give that customer a holistic customer experience. 

Therefore, multichannel marketing is far less advanced than omnichannel marketing. However, it is much easier to implement.

But they do work together! 

eCommerce marketers generally want to start with finessing their multichannel marketing, and then invest in omnichannel marketing, which takes channel marketing a step further to create a seamless customer experience. 

Let’s look quickly at a breakdown of each. 

As you can see, the critical differences between multichannel marketing and omnichannel marketing center around marketing focus, data utilization, and customer journey integration. 

If multichannel marketing is like casting a wide net, omnichannel marketing is more like a well-orchestrated dance — every move is calculated and contributes to an overall, fluid experience. 

Essentially, you want to choose the approach that best aligns with your brand’s objectives and customer expectations.

What Distinguishes an Exceptional Multichannel Marketing Strategy? 

How do you know you have a winning multichannel marketing strategy? The same way you gauge all your marketing strategies: engagement and performance. 

However, it starts with clear objectives, data-driven decisions, and target audience understanding — down to each and every buyer persona. 

Let’s examine some key elements that point to an exceptional multichannel marketing strategy.

1. Customer-centric approach. A well-performing strategy will take a customer-centric approach that focuses on creating meaningful interactions with your audience across multiple channels, not just disseminating information.
2. Flexibility. An exceptional strategy is not rigid. It adapts and evolves based on consumer feedback and performance metrics.
3. Content customization. A good strategy will invest in channel-specific content that is tailored to your audience and customized for the medium it’s presented in.
4. Consistency. A high-performing multichannel marketing strategy will have consistent messaging across all channels, despite differences in how that marketing message is delivered. 
5. Brand reach. A good multichannel marketing strategy will focus on expanding brand awareness and product reach.
6. Seamless flow. With an excellent strategy, each different channel operates semi-independently; there should still be some level of coordination to ensure that messaging and branding are cohesive.
7. Dedicated monitoring. A winning strategy will have key monitoring mechanisms in place to continuously evaluate the success of your strategy and make necessary adjustments.
8. Advanced automation. Lastly, to really ensure your multichannel strategy is running at peak performance, you need advanced automation tools for managing, monitoring, and optimizing. 

Now, let’s get into the nitty-gritty: how to build a winning multichannel marketing strategy for your online store brand. 

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How to Build a Winning Multichannel Marketing Strategy 

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Here are the seven key steps you should take to build a successful multichannel marketing strategy:

1. Identify objectives
2. Conduct a target audience analysis
3. Choose your marketing channels
4. Plan your content and campaigns
5. Integrate your content, channels, and campaigns into your customer journey
6. Set yourself up for monitoring success
7. Tweak and repeat

Let’s dig deeper into each. 

Step #1: Identify Objectives

When rebuilding your multichannel marketing strategy, the first thing to do is return to your objectives. Ask yourself what you are aiming to achieve — is it brand awareness, lead generation, or conversions? 

Your objectives will set the foundation for every step of your marketing strategy. For instance, if your goal is to reach brand-new potential customers for the first time, then your list of marketing channels may include: 

• Content marketing
• Digital marketing
• Social media marketing 

You wouldn’t, say, include retargeting email marketing in an awareness multi-channel campaign. Or SMS marketing. It is important to match the channels, as well as the message and the audience, to the goal of your campaign. 

You can, of course, have a different objective for each multi-channel marketing campaign. 

Step #2: Conduct a Target Audience Analysis

Next, you want to match your objective with the shoppers most likely to help you realize your goals. This means truly understanding who your potential customers are, their preferences, and where they hang out online.

In other words, you need to define your buyer persona — or multiple ones, in the case of multiple campaigns with multiple objectives. This will help you better plan your campaign and how it ties in with your customer journey, ultimately producing better results.  

To audit your target audience, you will want to: 

1. Define their demographics (age, location, education, etc.)
2. Research their psychographics (interests, opinions, behaviors, attitudes, etc.) 
3. Create a buyer persona based on demographics and psychographics 
4. Build a list of marketing channels (their preferred channel/where they hang out) 
5. Identify possible pain points, needs, or challenges 
6. Map their shopping journey 

Step #3: Choose Your Marketing Channels

Once you know why you’re setting up your multichannel campaigns, and who you are hoping to reach, then it’s time to select appropriate marketing channels. 

Let’s look at the top eCommerce marketing channels worth considering. 

Every single channel on this list has its own benefits, reach, and style. They also have different cost implications and different audiences, so start small and grow. Be it a Google ad, an email newsletter, or a combination of the two, you want to pick channels that best represent your goals. 

Why?

Some channels will make far more sense based on your objectives and audiences, so start with those first, expanding as your multichannel marketing strategy gets more established. 

Step #4: Plan Your Content and Campaigns

Next, you want to focus on defining singular messaging for your buyer persona — or personas, if you’re building more than one multichannel marketing campaign. It is vital that you create a cohesive experience across multiple channels while simultaneously adapting the content to fit each single channel perfectly. 

You want to ensure that every multichannel marketing campaign includes a wide range of content. This includes organic content, such as blog posts, social media content (like TikTok videos or Instagram Stories), podcasts, webinars, etc. And paid content and eCommerce ads, such as eCommerce Google ads, sponsored content (influencers), paid PR, etc. 

But be sure that you take into consideration every channel and what type of content suits it best — creating accordingly. The messaging will ultimately be the same; however, how you present the message could be completely different. For instance, let’s say you are planning your B2B marketing strategy; what you post on LinkedIn would be very different from YouTube shorts. 

Finally, once you have planned your content and campaigns, you will then need to develop a content calendar that specifies what, when, and where to post. But remember, they don’t exist in a vacuum; you need to consider your customer journey. 

Step #5: Integrate Your Content, Channels, and Campaigns into Your Customer Journey

Next, you will want to ensure that your multichannel marketing campaigns integrate into your overall customer experience mechanisms. Fundamentally, you want to ensure that all the content works in harmony so that the transition by a potential customer, from channel to channel to store, is as smooth and user-friendly as possible. 

You want to consider your campaign objective and buyer persona to see where your campaign would best fit on your customer journey. You also want to ensure the content flows seamlessly with other digital touchpoints to create a seamless customer experience. 

Your integration approach should also include a content and advertising management system to deploy your campaigns simultaneously, and a robust CRM strategy to handle responses and queries.

Step #6: Set Yourself Up for Monitoring Success

The next step in building a winning multichannel marketing strategy is setting up your monitoring and reporting. In a nutshell, you want to plan how you measure attribution. This is vital in ensuring you can track and monitor KPIs and other metrics and then compile results to assess your performance against objectives. 

Ideally, you’ll want to use marketing automation tools or analytics software that will enable you to track analytics in real-time. Either way, you may want to consider one of these attribution models:

• Position-based attribution 
• Time decay attribution 
• Linear attribution 

You can read more about attribution modeling in more detail in our full guide: eCommerce Attribution Modeling Made Easy.

Step #7: Tweak and Repeat

The last secret sauce to a well-functioning cross-channel marketing strategy is optimization. This means making data-driven adjustments to your multichannel campaigns. 

Tweaking and optimizing are crucial for refining a multichannel marketing strategy, especially in the fast-paced world of eCommerce. To do this successfully, you will need to: 

• Use A/B testing to try out different headlines, visuals, or calls-to-action to see what resonates most with your audience 
• Keep an eye on what competitors are doing successfully and consider how you can adapt or improve upon those tactics (benchmarketing)
• Keep an eye on KPIs like click-through rates, conversion rates, and ROI for each different channel to understand performance
• Adapt your strategy to accommodate seasonal trends, holidays, or special events that are relevant to your eCommerce business
• Use customer surveys and reviews to gain insights into what’s working and what needs improvement
• Use marketing automation tools like Traffic Booster to automate and streamline optimization
• Make regular assessments of your strategy and be willing to make quick changes based on customer data and feedback

By continually tweaking and optimizing, you ensure that your multichannel marketing strategy remains competitive, relevant, and effective in achieving your eCommerce goals. This will also help you improve your customer experience, boosting retention and building long-term customer loyalty. 

Wrap Up 

There you have it: everything you need to build a winning multi-channel marketing strategy for your online retail store. 

No matter what digital marketing channels you use, the key is ensuring they work seamlessly together and with your other marketing campaigns to create a seamless customer experience — that converts. 

Still have multi-channel marketing strategy questions? Post them in the comments section below! 

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