Cross-Marketing and How to Implement It

Cross-marketing. Clients today have more channels than ever to interact with your business, and they’ll likely contact you through many different channels before they convert. It could be social media, articles, blog posts, TV ads, online ads, and others. To win in a competition in today’s market, you should be ready to present yourself to customers at the right times on all channels you’re clients are using.

Otherwise, your competitors might get ahead of you. In addition, you want your marketing activities across all channels to pull together to assist a seamless customer journey. How can you comply with these needs and create an effective marketing strategy that works effectively across all platforms? The right choice is cross-marketing. In this post, let’s discuss what cross-marketing means and discuss some examples of cross-marketing to help you create more effective marketing strategies.

What is a Cross Marketing?

Cross-channel marketing is a client-focused digital marketing method used by marketing experts all over the world to provide a unified experience via all paid, owned, earned media, and digital experiences on various platforms.

It is a powerful way of creating a marketing strategy and implementing data and analysis to create multi-channel customer journeys towards your achieving your goals.

The purpose of your cross-channel marketing system must be to tell the audience a compelling brand story over different channels. You need to do this in some unique way for everyone while taking care of user engagement. Your story should be customized to fit different platforms. Meaning you can’t just duplicate and publish each channel with the exact same content or post. While on one channel a video (think social media) is more appropriate, another platform was created for tips of something that convey a complete message, as found on a blog. Find out what functions and approaches work well and you will get a successful cross-channel marketing strategy.

Benefits of a Cross Marketing

There are several advantages as well as minuses of cross-channel marketing that marketers should know about them before using this method.

Pros of Cross-Channel Marketing

• Extended audience communication. This technique allows you to achieve your potential clients via different platforms according to their preferences. You can publish your ads on social channels to target the right message to the audience or even use paid advertising to get ahead of your competitors. 
• Regular messages. By the cross-marketing approach, you can keep on sending brand-associated messages to your customers regularly. It might get annoying for your clients if they get lots of messages about your offers in a short period of time. You must create the right email or SMS marketing strategy to reach them out.
• Brand awareness. With cross-media marketing you not only move your product to the market but also build its significance throughout. Convincing your followers or website visitors to buy your product with just your first marketing touchpoint is not easy as you must gather more touchpoints to transform them into prospective buyers.

Cons Of Cross Marketing

• Time-consuming. It is not always possible to synchronize all the possible platforms, so you must keep updating each of them manually about any changes in prices or offers. You might get confused about the products and offers. 
• Expensive platform. As you use more marketing channels, it would require more resources which may surpass your budget. Some channels need a lot of your attention and effort to get running smoothly.
• Mishandled Customer management. Just like the channels, the clients are spread wide and can be hardly reaching which means if you are not able to satisfy your client’s needs on time you might put at risk your reputation and relationship with them. 

To perform this strategy successfully you must use some tips to get them going. Some guidelines that you can follow can be to allocate the channels to different departments and organize an integrated marketing team so there is a clear understanding among the staff, and they are aware of their responsibilities. A multi-channel platform where every single visitor is served equally well and receives valuable services should be their priority. 

Tips for Building Successful Cross Marketing Campaigns

The main aim of cross-channel marketing is to create personalized and engaging experiences for visitors. Keep in mind these tips while crafting a cross-marketing campaign: 

1. Use Data-driven Decision-making

In order to develop a successful campaign, companies must be data-driven. They need to define who their target audience is, what channels they often use, and what messaging they respond to. High-quality data gathered from multiple platforms will provide you with trends and patterns in behavior that can be used to understand your audience’s preferences and decisions.

2. Build Buyer Personas with Aggregate and Person-level Data

Comprehensive buyer portraits can help find out your target audience’s motivation and shopping habits, and get a better idea of what and who they are already engaging with. By combining both aggregate and person-level customer data, you can discover patterns and similarities between groups, allowing you to divide your audience into segments. This information can then be used to find the most relevant cross-channel marketing solutions and messaging, and achieve your goals.

3. Use Mediums that Supplement One Another

When you’re choosing and defining channels for cross-channel marketing, you need to be strict and selective. Particular channels work better together than others. Try to synchronize all channels through which your audience engages the most with your company.

For example, you can ask your clients to get a welcome discount via your app or include URLs in emails or posts.

Common mediums that complement each other include:

• Retail Store/Mobile
• TV/Mobile
• Radio/Mobile
• Computer/TV
• Computer/Mobile
• Computer/Radio

4. Use the Appropriate Marketing Technology

Strong analytics is what gives us actionable data into the client’s preferences, so it’s critical that you choose a marketing technology that is collecting accurate, high-quality data. Automation is another core functionality to use when identifying what tool is going to best fit the needs of your company. With the right cross-channel marketing solutions, marketers can gain a better understanding of their target audience. Among other things, marketing methods should enable the marketers to optimize:

• When they show ads,
• Which channels they use to perform their ads on,
• The messages they use to communicate with their target audience.

An effective marketing team should streamline communications and help to build a consistent customer journey that identifies and uses the channels and messages that your target audience is interacting with the most.

5. Line Up Content with a Specific Buyer’s Journey

Each customer’s journey is different, and each of them should be prepared in different personalized ways. By this, I mean designing content specifically for prospects based on their shopping habits. As a result, your content strategy needs to be created so that it aligns well with all buyers’ journeys.

For example, when a client abandons their shopping cart, you can send out an email or notification in the app that offers a discount to them. The same relates to those who are buying your products, you can send them a thank you email. This way, they’ll engage with your content on different platforms and follow the action you want them to.

6. Continuously Optimize Multiple KPIs

The hint to creating successful campaigns is to analyze past activities and apply the lessons learned to future strategies. Campaigns should be continuously adjusted for multiple key performance indicators (KPIs) throughout the whole marketing funnel. The received information can provide marketing teams with important insights into marketing ROI, allowing them to find the right solutions about how campaigns can be further optimized in the future.

7. Unify Your Data

A unified marketing measurement approach enables a marketing team to make a comprehensive review of each channel and campaign, how they impact each other, and their overall result on driving conversions. By taking all of these factors into consideration, companies can better understand each campaign’s effect on driving conversions. This will give you a more accurate view of all marketing campaigns and how they work together and affect each other, allowing marketers to get the most of their budget and avoid ineffective ads.

Typically, this contains using browsing cookies or tracking URLs to set connections between online actions with a personal lead’s profile. Monitor and analyze the emails that have been sent to them, and which ones they have engaged with.

You must also find out which blog posts they have read, the social media campaigns they liked and engaged with, and communication that your customer support team had with them.

8. Test with Control Groups

A control group is basically a group of users who haven’t seen your ads from your marketing campaigns. Think of analyzing different testing groups that are not targeted by any cross-marketing to assess your marketing campaigns’ efficiency.

They can be used to assess the impact of engagement campaigns to understand which marketing campaign is working better and which requires changes.

Control groups also tell marketers if they should stop using any marketing campaign at all for a specific segment of consumers and simply let those consumers follow their usual path.

9. Integrate Your Discoveries

Launching strong cross-marketing campaigns is one step, but analyzing their insights can dramatically change your marketing strategy. Interlace your insights from your marketing campaigns to create a smooth experience.

Ask yourself questions like:

• Does my social media strategy synchronize with my web strategy?
• Does my campaign transmit the same message throughout different platforms?
• Do I use appropriate targeting to the right audience on each channel?
• Is X social media platform better than Y website?

When all channels are well-synchronized together, the customer experience will be the best. Your customers will know what to expect every time they engage with your brand and they will come to your business eagerly.

Three Cross Marketing Examples to Get You Inspired

Now let’s go back to see how the big companies are implementing it.

M&M’s cross-marketing

The first cross-marketing example comes from M&M’s. The candy brand launched a TV ad during Super Bowl LV and keep the same campaign on social media, merging traditional and digital channels. The ad, titled “Come Together,” shows its audience saying sorry for their social faux pas with M&M’s. Check it out here:

Using a traditional TV ad let M&M’s reach a greater audience, especially since it has been shown during the biggest TV program of the year. The brand also used the ad to boost engagement on its social channels. These cross-channel marketing activities allowed M&M’s to enhance the popularity of both TV ads and social media.

M&M’s also offered to use several hashtags associated with the ad, #MMSTogether, and #BetterWithMMS. It motivated its followers to use the hashtags and use them in the posts related to their campaign and the Super Bowl. M&M’s published them on social throughout the game, keeping followers engaged. Using a traditional TV ad-enabled M&M’s to reach a broad audience and allowed M&M’s to boost their position on both TV and social media channels.

Topshop cross-marketing

Topshop used digital billboards throughout the UK during London Fashion Week to advertise its latest catalog. The company synchronized the advertisements with its Twitter data, so when followers used the hashtag #LFW, the billboard would show the tweet and a relevant item from the catalog. 

In addition, the advertisements were all placed within ten minutes of the Topshop’s stores, so any viewers who were interested could immediately visit their shop and buy the items they wanted. The brand earned a 75% boost in revenue for the clothes related to the #LFW hashtag.

Image: Stackla

Starbucks

With a help of its app, Starbucks has combined offline and online experiences. With the help of a reinforcement learning platform, the app awards fans for their purchases and even offers personalized recommendations based on their purchasing habits. Users also get push notifications for a discount or other offers the brand has, which results in more foot traffic.

Through an integrated experience, Starbucks is greeting its clients where they are in nearly every moment. AI marketing has provided consumer insights that not only learn behavior but also predict it. In real-time, customers can check and reload their card directly from their phone, making it as simple as possible for clients to buy from anywhere and at any time.

Conclusion

By using the data insights from your marketing campaigns, you can make consistent improvements to ensure that your cross-channel marketing strategy is giving you good real results. A cross-marketing strategy is a successful and sophisticated way to reach out to your audience. From increasing brand awareness to generating leads and driving higher sales, a strong cross-channel marketing strategy will help you do it all.

You have to make sure that your content and customer service are well-aligned with each channel to provide a smooth message to your audience. Test your strategy with control groups and improve it until it becomes brings the best results.