Sarah MannoneThese days, multi-channel marketing is essential to business promotion. With a dizzying array of platforms to choose from, single-platform campaigns are too concentrated to be effective. The best way to navigate is to adapt to the era with content that can go everywhere your audience goes, from your website to social media platforms and beyond.
The only catch is that marketing via blogs, print, digital marketing, social media, and other means can be both time-consuming and labor-intensive for marketing teams. It’s crucial to have a strategy when you take on a project that is widespread in scale or you’ll find yourself and your team quickly getting frustrated. Luckily, there are ways to streamline the process while reaping the benefits of multichannel marketing. Here’s our five most valuable tips for running a successful multichannel marketing campaign:
1. Best Practices, Best People
Marketing across many channels leads to many ways of measuring your success. Just as SEO analytics aren’t the same as social media analytics, your strategy for one channel may differ from another. You need to be multifaceted when it comes to knowing what makes each channel tick, and more importantly, you need people on your team who know more than you.
How do you pick those on your team best suited to become superstars for each channel? Find out which channels your colleagues are interested in and where they already have expertise. Your team will be empowered to do their best work when they’re interested and invested in the task.
2. Everything’s Easier With An Editorial Calendar
It might seem daunting to keep track of so many channels at the same time, but planning it all out visually helps to bring some order to the chaos. It’s easier to coordinate content creation with a concrete plan for what you’ll post and when you’ll post it. If you use marketing automation software like HubSpot, you can even create an editorial calendar and schedule posts at the same time.
Then the question is: how often should you post? It depends on your clients’ needs. For example, quantity isn’t always the priority — in fact, if you post more than twice a day on many platforms, you’ll experience a drop in engagement. Benchmark data from HubSpot revealed that Facebook pages with under 10,000 fans suffered a 50% drop in engagement per post when the page posted more than once per day. Consequently, posting once a day is usually best, and don’t worry if your resources are limited enough that that doesn’t work for you: three to nine posts a week per channel is a good range.
Another piece of good news is that time of day doesn’t matter as much as you might think. Peak hours are a real thing, but total engagement remains steady enough throughout the day that you can just focus on content instead. Plus, platform algorithms play a large part in when your post is shown to followers. That means you can arrange your posts on your editorial calendar to spread your posts at an even rate throughout the week, and publish them more or less during business hours.
3. Data Is Your Friend
Data from your previous campaigns can tell you everything you need to know about your current one, but it can be hard to know where to start. There are a variety of metrics to focus on, so if you’re feeling lost, go with a few key ones. For instance, volume and reach tell you who’s talking about your brand right now and how many potential new followers are seeing it. Volume is where you’re at, whereas reach is about potential growth.
Engagement is a complex metric, so let’s break it down a bit further. On most platforms, you can like, share, and comment on posts. Likes are great, but most platforms’ algorithms place more weight on comments and shares. That’s because instead of passively clicking “like” and scrolling by, a comment or share represents a more involved interaction between a user and your brand. Look at which posts get more comments and shares and that can indicate what you can do more of!
Together, engagement and reach can tell you whether you need more people to see your content or if you need to make more engaging content. If you have high reach but aren’t gaining much volume or engagement, you might need to look at the content you post. If you have low reach, you might want to think about paid ads or strategies to get more views, shares, and engagement.
4. Make It A Habit!
It can be helpful to set aside time each month to look at analytics and course-correct if you need. This system works as a reminder to take data trends into account. If you struggle to see patterns when you look at your stats consistently, a monthly analysis could be something to try. If you have someone on the team who handles analytics, a monthly meeting with them is the perfect way to get the ball rolling.
This tip can go for any part of your campaign that you find can get left by the wayside. If you tend to forget about blog updates, you can sit down every month and generate topics, research competitor blogs, and read more about pertinent topics. Before you know it, you’ll barely think twice about making time for blogs.
5. Visuals are Crucial
We live in a visual era, so make sure there’s recognizable aesthetics to your marketing content. A cohesive style is the number one element that makes your content feel cohesive across channels. That’s why brands have logos or distinctive color schemes — it tells a story across print, TV, blog, and social media spots. According to design theorist William Lidwell, people remember images significantly better than words. Why stick to 140 characters when you could post a picture worth a thousand?
Whether you outsource your graphic design work or work with in-house designers, visuals should be given the budget and resources they need to look stunning — for both consistent branding and for maximum ROI. Whoever writes the copy should also be working closely with the designer to coordinate their work. Lidwell also says that people remember ads with a combination of text and visuals better than either images or words alone.
Collaborate with Your Team and Have a Plan
There are two major points to crystallize out of all this — the people you work with are crucial to executing multichannel marketing campaigns, and that work will feel much less overwhelming if you can organize, analyze, and delegate it to your most qualified and interested colleagues. With those tips, you can get a handle on any campaign, even across multiple channels.
