On the importance of multi-channel marketing today…

The cus­tomer jour­ney has trans­formed – it is more com­plex than ever and mar­ket­ing meth­ods must shift with the trends. Con­sumers or prospects gen­er­al­ly don’t use a sin­gle brows­ing device any­more. In fact, the cus­tomer jour­ney often involves many devices over a peri­od of time span­ning hours, days, weeks or months; some­times even longer. 67% of con­sumers move between devices while shop­ping online and 92% of those switch devices in a sin­gle day.

That’s not all. We also have the expectan­cy of imme­di­a­cy to con­tend with…

With a stag­ger­ing 82% of smart­phone users turn­ing to their phone to eval­u­ate a pur­chase deci­sion (while in store!) it’s quite clear that buy­ing habits have evolved.

How can busi­ness­es accom­plish a suc­cess­ful mar­ket­ing cam­paign with­out con­sid­er­a­tion of numer­ous chan­nels? These days, they sim­ply can’t.

(A recent sur­vey from Regal­ix revealed that over 50 per­cent of senior B2B mar­keters con­sid­er mul­ti-chan­nel mar­ket­ing ini­tia­tive to be ‘very impor­tant.)

Mobile users are more inclined to use social media to influ­ence their deci­sion to pur­chase. We’ve seen the explo­sion of Face­book, Insta­gram and Snapchat ads over the last few years. Twit­ter, is key for rapid cus­tomer ser­vice – the nation knows this and utilis­es it to their advan­tage, par­tic­u­lar­ly mil­len­ni­als.

How does multi-channel affect a typical purchase journey?

A pur­chase-focused Google search query indi­cates intent which may lead to an organ­ic or ad click, but that’s just one stage of the jour­ney. That same vis­i­tor may leave; their pur­chase intent fad­ing for a while until the brand in ques­tion pops up again on social media. That nudges the poten­tial cus­tomer slight­ly. Per­haps not enough though…

A few weeks pass and all of a sud­den a remar­ket­ing ad hits them on a niche blog. Bin­go! Just the reminder they need­ed.

The user then pops a prod­uct into their vir­tu­al bas­ket… but sud­den­ly they get inter­rupt­ed by a neigh­bour knock­ing at the door. The lap­top is shut. The pur­chase isn’t made.

But wait… now they receive a trig­gered email to remind them about the unfin­ished pur­chase. Per­fect! The prod­uct is final­ly bought.

Now, if busi­ness­es aren’t embrac­ing such a blend of mar­ket­ing chan­nels and ini­tia­tives pre­sent­ed as a seam­less omni-chan­nel expe­ri­ence, they are already years behind the curve and miss­ing out on valu­able con­ver­sions.

I recent­ly explained the neces­si­ty of cus­tomer jour­ney map­ping and unveiled an awe­some tool for doing so here.

What about B2B purchase journeys?

Some read­ers might be think­ing, ‘‘That doesn’t apply to me; I sell to busi­ness­es!’’

If that’s you, think again…

• 2015 research from Google found 42 per­cent of researchers use a mobile device dur­ing their B2B pur­chas­ing process.
• Mobile usage for B2B pur­chase research has rock­et­ed 91% over the last two years with more than three-quar­ters of busi­ness execs still brows­ing con­tent on their lap­tops or desk­tops – high­light­ing the trend for years to come.

The oppor­tu­ni­ty is immense and the brands run­ning such com­plex cam­paigns are reap­ing the ben­e­fits.

How much so?

• Poten­tial B2B buy­ers who feel a “high brand con­nec­tion” are 60% more like­ly to con­sid­er, pur­chase, and even pay a pre­mi­um than “low brand con­nec­tion” com­peti­tors.
• Last year’s find­ings from Google dis­cov­ered cross chan­nel cus­tomers who shop on mul­ti­ple chan­nels present a 30% high­er life­time val­ue than those who shop via a sin­gle chan­nel.

On the main challenges that business are facing… (“ANCRAS”)

It seems to be dif­fi­cult for busi­ness­es to adopt this new way of think­ing for a few rea­sons:

• Aware­ness – Small­er busi­ness­es per­haps aren’t in tune with the tech­nol­o­gy that’s now avail­able to us (and things move real fast, mak­ing it even tougher to stay on top).
• Naivety – Some busi­ness own­ers may attempt to avoid the inevitable and car­ry on as they are, regard­less of the evi­dent trends.
• Choice – Busi­ness­es that are aware strug­gle to decide which solu­tion is ide­al for their par­tic­u­lar needs. There are hun­dreds of mar­ket­ing automa­tion, CRM, and ana­lyt­ics providers out there, each with var­ied and often daunt­ing solu­tions.
• Resource – Both in the form of invest­ment and inter­nal capac­i­ty; such inte­gra­tions require sub­stan­tial amounts of each.
• Accu­ra­cy – Once every­thing is in place… now what? Do teams know how to imple­ment cam­paigns, test, mea­sure, lis­ten and act on results across mul­ti­ple chan­nels?
• Size – Com­mu­ni­ca­tion across larg­er teams can become extreme­ly com­plex to har­monise. Sim­i­lar­ly, a busi­ness with 3 employ­ees may strug­gle with the demand­ing nature of such cam­paigns.

I’m going to coin that “ANCRAS” – not sure if it’s been cov­ered any­where else so I’m claim­ing it while I can!

On who should take the initiative for change…

From expe­ri­ence, it seems ideas don’t always trav­el in the expect­ed direc­tion – all too often, they derive from senior mar­keters to direc­tors, then up towards c‑level.

How­ev­er, for brands to tru­ly embrace holis­tic mar­ket­ing, I think this struc­ture needs to change for com­plete adop­tion through­out larg­er brands and cor­po­rate com­pa­nies.

That said, there’s always brands like Apple — Steve Jobs was the top man and influ­enced the entire work­force to think dif­fer­ent­ly. I guess every busi­ness is dif­fer­ent and each dis­plays their own unique cul­ture.

On the agency role…

Com­bin­ing my answers above, it makes a lot of sense to hire an agency these days. It com­plete­ly min­imis­es risk and max­imis­es prof­itabil­i­ty.

An agency brings expe­ri­ence and all hands on deck around the clock, leav­ing busi­ness­es to run oper­a­tions and all oth­er top-lev­el ini­tia­tives. It’s just what agen­cies do, all day every­day and it’s their job to bring their knowl­edge to the table and take the hard work off the shoul­ders of inter­nal teams.

Com­plex mar­ket­ing cam­paigns often require intense focus – out­sourc­ing alle­vi­ates this pres­sure and the time required to intro­duce them into teams.

The down­side? Ded­i­cat­ed agency time can become very cost­ly…

Which is why, some­times a com­bi­na­tion of in-house + agency resource can work best!

On whether there is enough understanding and investment in SEO…

Google isn’t going any­where and there’s no oth­er chan­nel that can boast 40,000 search­es per sec­ond, right?! Busi­ness­es sim­ply can­not afford to miss this audi­ence. Any­body who says SEO is expen­sive needs to think about the cost of not being found at all.

SEO isn’t an option – it’s a neces­si­ty and it will con­tin­ue to be, even if Google plugs anoth­er 3 or 4 ads into the SERPs. Why? Because peo­ple trust organ­ic results more than paid results.

There’s always been spec­u­la­tion over ad and organ­ic CTR. Well, check this:

Research this year shows only 4.2% CTR for AdWords ads in posi­tion 1… that’s even after the removal of ads on the right-hand rail.

Anoth­er data exper­i­ment from this year indi­cates a CTR of almost 23% on the first organ­ic result – even with ads on dis­play for such queries.

If dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing is the cake, SEO is flour. Google’s influ­ence is immense­ly pow­er­ful and we all need a slice of that. Organ­ic pres­ence is fun­da­men­tal to busi­ness suc­cess – sprin­kle effec­tive AdWords cam­paigns into the mix for com­peti­tor oblit­er­a­tion!

To achieve max­i­mum impact and recall, brands must be seen at every touch point pos­si­ble and also con­sume the most ter­ri­to­ry. In the case of Google SERPS; it is ide­al to own a ‘blue link’ organ­ic result in addi­tion to a paid result, local pack result and knowl­edge graph result… or even mul­ti­ples of these prop­er­ties for a sin­gle search query.

On winning over stakeholders…

I think we reached a mile­stone not so long ago – every­body seems to know they should ‘do SEO’ now. This has made the whole process much eas­i­er…

So today, it’s more the case of prov­ing your meth­ods work.

A few years ago, I would use data-dri­ven CTRs tak­en from indus­try research to deter­mine cost-effec­tive­ness of organ­ic ver­sus AdWords clicks, extrap­o­lat­ing the data as if all the pos­si­ble traf­fic was paid for through ads.

So, if the month­ly search vol­ume was say 3,200 for a giv­en key­word, CTR was 8% for organ­ic posi­tion 1 and AdWords esti­mat­ed CPC @ £6.20, that would pro­vide ‘free’ traf­fic (256 clicks at posi­tion 1) to the val­ue of £1,587 if paid for through AdWords.

This hypoth­e­sis always did the trick for me.

SEO also has its part to play in nur­tur­ing the end con­ver­sion… I described attri­bu­tion mod­el­ling in this arti­cle – anoth­er string to the marketer’s bow and espe­cial­ly use­ful when seek­ing c‑suite buy in.

On how SEO can work in harmony with PR, Social, or Paid media…

It’s all about break­ing down silos – these mar­ket­ing prac­tices must now become a col­lab­o­ra­tive effort.

An SEO team may be tar­get­ing a link on a respect­ed web­site, or maybe the PR team has an exist­ing rela­tion­ship with the senior edi­tor. These oppor­tu­ni­ties are eas­i­ly missed if inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tion is poor.

Once a link is gained, it’s down to the social media depart­ment to slam dunk the fea­ture with plen­ty of shares across the brand’s net­works, poten­tial­ly lead­ing to fur­ther back­links to that page (indi­rect­ly send­ing com­pound­ed ‘link juice’ to the teams’ web­site).

Every com­po­nent inter­twines and con­tributes to the cus­tomer jour­ney. Each touch point the prospect hits; the clos­er they are to mak­ing their pur­chase. It’s our job as mar­keters to inter­cept and influ­ence that deci­sion as much as pos­si­ble. The more col­lec­tive touch points we score, the greater our con­trol on the pur­chase cycle. That goes for owned, earned and paid media across the board.

Anoth­er exam­ple can be tak­en from my web­site… it’s nev­er been live, only a sin­gle page data cap­ture since ear­ly 2016. Despite this, I’ve gained 500+ signups and an awe­some back­link pro­file:

There are some great domains point­ing to it includ­ing Muck Rack, The Huff­in­g­ton Post and IBM.

This is the result of a blend­ed strat­e­gy apply­ing social media, infor­mal out­reach and guest blog­ging.

Take a look at my Twit­ter pres­ence in just 15 months of activ­i­ty:

(That’s giv­en my Twit­ter pro­file a Moz PA score of 68!)

The ben­e­fits of using all chan­nels in con­junc­tion with one anoth­er are unques­tion­able. In my case, I have uncon­ven­tion­al­ly lever­aged social media to pro­vide SEO val­ue… but it can (and more com­mon­ly so), also be applied the oth­er way around. Rank­ing high­ly in Google pro­vides more atten­tion = greater chance of your mate­r­i­al being includ­ed in blogs and con­se­quent­ly shared on social media.

On cross-channel reporting and connecting disparate KPIs…

I firm­ly believe all bot­tom line KPIs should be aligned across teams and the small­er steps to achiev­ing these goals synced and pro­mot­ed in uni­son – else there’s dan­ger of dis­joint­ed mar­ket­ing cam­paigns and incon­sis­tent mes­sag­ing across each chan­nel.

To hit cus­tomers at the right time in their buy­ing jour­ney (with pre­cise mes­sag­ing), every­thing has to be clear-cut inter­nal­ly too. It should be up to the senior heads to dri­ve this approach in any cor­po­ra­tion. It just cir­cum­vents ten­sion and every­body works towards the same goals; an ide­al sce­nario!

I know most of us hate meetings…but pro­duc­tive meet­ings should be made a habit – every­body in a com­pa­ny must be on the same page to squeeze each cam­paign to its full poten­tial.

Com­mu­ni­ca­tion is every­thing.