Navigating the multichannel maze

Multichannel marketing is building on its momentum from 2012 and 
remains a key area of focus this year. But what does it involve and what challenges does it pose? Claire Weekes investigates.

Thanks to the rise in the number of channels now available, devising a multichannel strategy has become essential for most B2B marketers. From traditional offline channels to the plethora of digital options, marketers are now spoilt for choice when it comes to selecting the best mix in order to get their marketing messages across. The beauty of an effective multichannel strategy means that all of these channels can blend and work together.

So how, as a B2B marketer, can 
you make the most of the explosion of channels open for you to use? And what are the challenges associated with putting together a multichannel approach to your marketing campaigns?

Although the term ‘multichannel’ is nothing new, there remains some confusion in the marketing industry about what it is, and how it differs from the term ‘integrated’.

Dan Mortimer, CEO at digital agency, Red Ant, sums it up like this, “Multichannel is like a smorgasbord – it all works better, and allows businesses to take advantage of a ‘joined-up’ sales process. Its sum is greater than its parts but, equally, each part works on its own. 

“Integrated marketing, on the other hand, is like a cake – if you don’t have all the ingredients, your campaign won’t be as good, or effective, as it can be, and you may miss sales opportunities.

“Both have their place for effective promotion and commerce in the 21st century, but each serves different needs – while multichannel is very much focused on the customer, integrated marketing is arguably about achieving brand aims,” 
he says.

The customer was at the heart of Siemens Healthcare’s multichannel campaign designed to attract senior healthcare customers to its stand

at the Laboratory Diagnostics tradeshow. The campaign utilised email, event and SMS marketing.

Create a customer experience

Before the show Siemens invited 25 executives to meet with its sales team during the conference. By signing up with their phone number, registered executives received a reminder text 15 minutes prior to their scheduled meeting. To make a memorable impression, Siemens set up digital banners at their booth prompting visitors to opt-in for daily schedules, product information, email sign-up and more via text message. It also gave tradeshow attendees the opportunity to provide speaker feedback using their 
mobile phones.

The aim was to improve engagement and audience retention during the tradeshow. Twenty of the 25 C-level executives contacted by SMS turned up for their scheduled meeting with the sales team.

As Siemens Healthcare demonstrated, a multichannel approach is all about creating a customer experience to increase loyalty and ultimately, ROI. It also offers a great way for brands to engage with their audiences via the many different tools 
now available, such as PCs, tablets and mobile devices.

But a well-executed multichannel approach doesn’t come without challenges.

Choosing the relevant channel

“It is vital to ensure the channel is relevant to your customer behaviours and your business objectives and not to simply be swayed by the rush to be seen using new technology or approaches,” explains Rachel Arquati, business director at Clear B2B Marketing and PR. “For example, developing blogs has become a popular method of creating content and engagement but knowing why you are doing it, what you are trying to achieve and whether it is hitting the spot is not always well thought through. If you want to introduce new ideas and assess their impact then running a trial can be particularly effective.”

Arquati and her team have been working with Toyota and Lexus Fleet Services for the past year as it seeks to grow. “Operating in a crowded marketplace, where it would be easy to be distracted by competitor activity and trends in channels, Toyota and Lexus Fleet Services are single minded in their marketing communications activity – ensuring it is always on strategy and using the channels that work for its target audience. The results speak for themselves with Toyota fleet vehicle sales exceeding 20,000 in the first six months of the campaign, which equated to an increase of 27 per cent for Toyota and 31 per cent for Lexus,” says Arquati.

Managing multiple data sets

Sticking to the appropriate channels is one challenge. But arguably the biggest challenge by far for the multichannel marketer concerns data – how does a brand collate data from multiple channels, use it to drive actionable insight, then determine the most profitable areas of further investment? It’s the million dollar question yet to be fully answered. The good news for B2B marketers though is that they can take a steer from their consumer counterparts, who arguably have a much bigger job to do when it comes to managing customer data.

“Tracking between different touchpoints is notoriously difficult, especially when the experiences at those touchpoints are facilitated by different systems, managed by different teams and delivered by different agencies. For online only businesses, connecting attribution, propensity and segmentation models can easily give an understanding of the role of each channel in the customer journey and inform messaging to key segments. But even for multichannel players, such as the major supermarket chains, joining the dots can be difficult,” says Adam Fulford, strategy and planning director at Rufus Leonard.

“Even with the power of Nectar for example, Sainsbury’s finds it logistically difficult to turn that insight into action, 
not just because of data consistency 
across channels and systems but because [the] online and offline businesses are 
run by different teams and Nectar is a different business altogether. As a result, the true ‘single customer view’ remains almost a mirage.

“Most clients are not dissimilar to Sainsbury’s. They are working with legacy databases not designed to accommodate the increasing proliferation of consumer engagement channels and are costly to update. While some are beginning to connect disparate systems, for most the perfect system would require a more revisionist approach,” adds Fulford.

Managing multiple data sets is also something Jamie Brighton, product marketing manager EMEA, digital marketing at Adobe, believes marketers are srtuggling with at the moment. He suggests optimising the customer journey in real-time across the different devices marketers use to operate on is an obstacle they struggle with.

He says, “The journey should be analysed so marketers can quickly identify which products and touchpoints are driving cross-channel behaviour. This is something Adobe has built into our digital marketing technologies, ensuring marketers have numerous ways of interacting across channels, social networks and enterprise content properties with intelligent ways of measuring those interactions.”

Support for content marketing

Challenges aside though, the general view is that the multichannel approach will be a strong focus for many in 2013. One of its attractions lies in its potential to work well with a content marketing strategy.

“Content marketing is the biggest challenge for B2B marketers right now, and multichannel marketing may help them get the most from it,” says Martin Smith, head of marketing at Neolane UK. “While defining your content management strategy, you have to think clearly about the channel you are going to use to promote that content.

“Let’s take a simple example: which channels should best be used to promote an infographic? Say it’s first published on a blog. You might then promote that blog on your website, via your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. Perhaps you already have some customers or prospects that have demonstrated an interest in the topic covered by this piece of content. Perhaps creating an email template using the same iconographic codes as the infographic may be a good idea. A direct mail piece might even be best for some specific targets. That’s already seven channels for a single piece of content.” Devising an effective multichannel strategy is by no means an easy business, and there are challenges associated with it, but for the brands that put in the effort it can certainly reap demonstrable rewards. Brighton concludes, “It is down to marketers to respond to the [multichannel] requirement, as it will increase brand loyalty and strengthen competitive differentiation.”


Five tips for planning a multichannel marketing strategy

Want to plan a multichannel strategy but not sure where to start? Shawn Cabral, marketing director at Sitecore UK, offers these tips

1. Create a culture that worships customer knowledge. The full promise of multichannel marketing is realised only when all customer interactions are calibrated around the customer’s current context and historical interaction with your company. Tackling different types of data and aggregating it for collective insight is an essential characteristic of any multichannel marketing system.

2. Stop thinking about campaigns and start thinking about engagement. Marketers who continue to build campaigns and make offers around products will be perceived as tone deaf to the multichannel customer. Customers will engage with marketers who meet their changing needs for different information and options during the buying journey.

3. Transform your website into a pervasive customer engagement hub. Too many marketers have grown accustomed to thinking of their websites as a collection of pages. That thinking is obsolete when virtually all multichannel touchpoints aim to drive customers to your website. Leverage highly dynamic websites to drive unique experiences for customers. Dynamically deliver content, messages, experiences, products and offers from pools of content assets based upon knowledge of the customer’s profile, behaviour and engagement history.

4. Build the technical infrastructure to support dynamic, cross-channel conversations with customers. It’s simply not possible to manage the delivery of dynamic, targeted, consistent content, offers and products, across digitally-enabled customer touchpoints when marketing tasks are semi-automated with a series of separate software tools.

5. Find a ‘trusted IT advisor’. Marketing is, and should be, inexorably bound up in technology. Marketing executives need a trusted IT advisor. Many CMOs will rethink the relationship with IT; some will turn to an external service provider; others will create a shadow IT organisation in marketing operations. Whatever the source, find your IT champion.

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