Cross-Channel Marketing Can Transform Your Small Business — Here’s How to Build a Winning Strategy

With most customers coming from online sources, entrepreneurs now need to focus a considerable amount of their time and marketing dollars on tools like social media, email marketing and online advertising. The challenge is that consumers have a wide range of preferences when it comes to online use. Some spend hours scrolling through social media, while others prefer to engage with brands directly through their websites or by researching what others are saying on their Yelp page. As a small business owner, it can be difficult to determine where to focus your marketing to achieve the best results.

The solution is creating a strategy that allows your business to focus on multiple channels simultaneously. It’s proven that companies that use a cross-channel marketing strategy are able to retain twice the number of customers and increase sales by nearly 300% compared to businesses that use single-channel campaigns. For this reason, every small business owner should have a cohesive cross-channel marketing strategy.

Related: 7 Ways to Create a Seamless Marketing Campaign Across All Platforms

What is cross-channel marketing?

Cross-channel marketing allows businesses to interact with customers across multiple channels while providing a seamless experience. Unfortunately, most businesses focus on each marketing channel in a silo. For example, a small business might run a Facebook ad. If the customer clicks on the ad and chooses not to purchase the product, that customer may be lost forever. With cross-channel marketing, the customer might receive a follow-up email with a special promotion or be targeted with an advertisement the next time they search on Google.

With multiple, cohesive touchpoints, cross-channel marketing improves a business’s ability to provide a seamless experience, improve customer engagement, produce higher conversion rates and provide better data insights. The last thing you want is for customers to get a different experience each time they interact with your brand, whether it’s on or offline.

1. Centralize your customer data

It’s important to know who your customers are and how they interact with your brand. The challenge is that many businesses don’t have a consolidated list of current and potential customers because they all use different platforms. For example, your Instagram follower list may look very different from your email newsletter subscribers.

By combining your customer data into a single source of truth, you can leverage it to provide better customer segmentation, customer journey mapping and personalized messaging. For small business owners, it’s worth the investment to implement a Centralized Consumer Data Platform (CDP) to help streamline this across all channels.

2. Omnichannel marketing automation

Creating content and supporting multiple marketing channels can be cumbersome and time-consuming. Fortunately, there are plenty of online platforms that help small businesses automate repetitive marketing tasks and personalization based on consumer behavior. Some of the top choices on the market are Hubspot Marketing Hub and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. These tools combine a wide range of tasks from customer tracking to email marketing to social media management in one place. Other options include Measured and Rockerbox. It’s important to carefully consider which one is right for your business based on the cost and features available.

3. Implement cross-channel attribution

As a small business owner, it’s likely that you have limited time and a small marketing budget. For this reason, you want to make sure that you are spending your efforts on the most effective marketing channels. With cross-channel marketing, it can be difficult to gauge which source ultimately led to a successful customer acquisition or sale. Let’s say a customer sees your Facebook ad, clicks on your Google link and follows a link from your email newsletter over the customer lifecycle. Which source actually locked in the sale? It’s hard to tell, and they likely all contributed in some way.

A great way to measure this is by implementing a cross-channel attribution metric. There are a few options, including first-click attribution, last-click attribution and time-delay attribution (where the links clicked most recently get the most “points”). While this may sound complicated, tools like Google Analytics, Salesforce and Hubspot all have some form of attribution metric to help you calculate which campaigns are the most effective.

Related: Mastering This Marketing Strategy is Your Ticket to Success in a Competitive World

Cross-channel marketing is a crucial element of any digital marketing strategy. It can streamline your digital marketing efforts while providing a better customer experience and improving your profit. By implementing these strategies, you can position your small business to thrive in today’s digital economy.