This practice refers to the simultaneous or alternating use of different contact channels (interfaces).
Whether you want to acquire new prospects, boost sales of your products and/or services, build customer loyalty or develop visibility and traffic at your various points of sale, it's important to adopt a relevant marketing strategy. The latter must enable you to effectively achieve your various objectives.
This is why companies are turning to multi-channel marketing. Indeed, this practice offers many advantages and has rapidly become essential for brands wishing to develop commercial contacts with their customers.
There are many ways of communicating with their customers. Traditionally, companies advertise on so-called "offline" channels (interfaces). These include all marketing tools available outside the web, such as billboards, stores, trade shows, radio, television, etc. It would be wrong to claim that this practice is outdated. It would be wrong to claim that this practice is outdated. In fact, although costly, this method is still as effective as ever.
With the rise of technology, new digital contact distribution channels have emerged:
-The website is a very important tool for being visible to consumers. Consumers are more likely to trust brands with their products if they have a website;
-social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, etc. These are truly rich databases to be exploited;
-The email address for interested users who have chosen to subscribe;
-SMS, etc.
These web tools complement the traditional physical channels mentioned above. The new, ultra-connected consumers spend more time online and expect to find, for example, on the web via social networks or an informative website, the various offers and services of their favorite brand.
This is why we need to implement a marketing strategy for these distribution channels: multi-channel marketing. As the name suggests, multi-channel marketing refers to the simultaneous or alternating use of different contact channels. This allows you to target and reach as many customers and prospects as possible.
To effectively achieve your company's various objectives, it's essential to implement an appropriate multi-channel strategy, and not stop at a single channel. To achieve this, you need to be able to progressively use complementary contact channels, while ensuring, of course, that your messages remain consistent and logical between them.
Multi-channel solutions are therefore an integral part of marketing strategies because it allows you to be exactly where your targets are, and therefore increase their engagement by adapting to their profile and offering them an optimal experience. You gain visibility and notoriety by covering the entire market in which you are positioned or wish to establish yourself.
It also builds customer loyalty by energizing your relationship with them. Thanks to an increased presence on the different channels, you collect more information and data, and benefit from more in-depth customer knowledge, enabling you to better understand and satisfy your customers. As a result, your customers are more inclined to return to your store to make their purchases.
Another advantage of this strategy is that it allows you to optimize your investments by choosing only the channels you need, giving you greater flexibility.
Channels must be chosen according to the behaviors, habits and preferences of your target consumers in order to optimize the impact of your actions. This is even more true if you run a network of several points of sale. Targets are not necessarily sensitive to the same communication channels, and do not interact in the same way with an advertising message broadcast by e-mail and on social networks, for example. It's not the same commitment. If you run a network of over fifty sales outlets scattered all over France, with customers and prospects who are often different from one another, you're bound to need to use numerous contact channels to communicate and reach your target audience.
Let's take an example: your company has an offer or service that appeals to both a young target audience (18-24) and a more adult target audience (45-54), so you need to make sure you're present on the online and offline communication channels on which the latter are present. This could be social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.) for the younger ones, or e-mail or other more traditional channels for the older ones. The larger your audience, the greater the number of different channels on which to place yourself. In this case, you need to be careful to manage these channels wisely.
To make this easier, you may want to use an online advertising platform that will enable your company to manage, in a single place, all the contact channels you wish to use to broadcast your communication campaign.
Although the terms may sound identical, it's very important not to confuse multi-channel, cross-channel and omnichannel marketing. They do not have the same meaning or approach.
As we saw earlier, multi-channel strategy refers to the practice whereby companies seek to vary the points of contact with their customers by using different channels simultaneously (or alternately).
Cross-channel marketing involves the simultaneous use of all channels, which interact with each other to streamline the consumer's purchasing journey.
As for the omnichannel solutionis the unified use of all possible and existing channels to deliver an optimal, harmonized experience to target customers.
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