Channel Marketing What Is It Why Does It Matter How To Do It?- Part II

Part I discusses channel marketing and its importance and advantages. This part discusses how to initiate a channel marketing strategy, so keep reading.

How to Start Channel Marketing

When embarking on channel marketing, recognize that you will likely need to adjust your approach and continuously improve as you progress. The more data you collect, the better you can understand your clients' cross-channel purchasing experience, informing enhancements across each channel.

Here’s how to launch a channel marketing campaign:

1. Consolidate Your Data

Before diving into channel marketing, ensure that you have clearly defined your client persona. A comprehensive understanding of your buyer persona is the foundation for any marketing endeavor.

Assuming you have mapped out your buyer persona, the first and fundamental step for any successful channel marketing strategy is to collect unified data within a Client Data Platform (CDP). Often, a Client Relationship Management (CRM) system can manage this data, so consider leveraging the tools. Regardless of which Client Data Platform you choose, ensure you can access the analytical data necessary to track touchpoints for each potential client.

This typically involves using page links or browser cookies to connect online actions with each potential client's contact profile. You should be able to track sent and engaged emails, impactful social media campaigns, blog articles read, paid ads clicked, and conversations held by sales or service teams with that client. All channels used for marketing or planned for future use should be documented and stored within the Client Data Platform (CDP).

2. Clarify Client Segments

Ideally, the Client Data Platform should generate insightful reports about clients that help you visualize and understand this data. However, even if you manually conduct digital analyses, your second step in starting channel marketing is to understand the client persona’s different segments.

Analyze touchpoint data to identify successes, failures, or discernible trends. For example, you may discover that most converted potential clients share common characteristics, such as a minimum number of interactions before conversion, average engagement time with your marketing efforts before becoming clients, or specific campaigns that yield high conversion rates.

By analyzing client data and creating a clear overview of your database’s different segments, you can determine which channels to prioritize and what types of content perform best across each channel.

Moving forward, it is crucial to document and contextualize each interaction to customize content effectively to meet your client's needs.

3. Leverage Smart Content for Unified Interactions

If your Client Data Platform (CDP) is integrated with a Content Management System (CMS), this step will likely be easier than if each platform operates independently. Even without integration, you can still succeed in channel marketing, but personalizing content may require more manual effort.

After analyzing and segmenting clients based on their interactions, the subsequent step is to customize content to fit each viewer’s needs. Intelligent content is the most effective way to achieve this, which is dynamic content defined based on a specific set of criteria. Simply, smart content operates on the principle: "If the viewer does this, show them that." This underscores the importance of consolidating all client interaction data within the Client Data Platform. You can identify the action taken and who took it, enabling you to design future interactions based on prior touchpoints.

Furthermore, with 83% of marketers affirming that producing fewer, high-quality content pieces is more effective, it is essential to prioritize quality over quantity. Understanding your clients' preferred type and format is crucial. The Marketing Trends Report has shown that, for the third consecutive year, videos are the most popular, and they are preferred by 59% of marketers.

If your Content Management System (CMS) supports smart content functionality, you can tailor content—or at least parts of it—based on the segmented lists you have developed for your contacts. For example, you can personalise the article for different client segments when publishing a blog post about one of your core services. Clients with a higher likelihood of conversion based on their previous interactions may see a call to action (CTA) encouraging them to contact the sales department. Conversely, if another client has recently visited the pricing page, they might encounter a CTA promoting a 10% discount offer. For those who have not engaged much or are interacting with your brand for the first time, this CTA can be replaced with recommendations for related content.

Regardless of where these readers are in their buyer's journey, you present them with the most relevant content for their current stage. If your CMS lacks integration with a Client Data Platform (CDP) or Client Relationship Management (CRM) system, you must explore alternative methods to customize content to align with viewer preferences manually.

For example, if you identify three distinct segments within a client persona, leverage this data to create three versions of your next newsletter, ensuring each segment receives the most relevant content. Additionally, this insight can inform the creation of customized audiences for targeted social media ads.

4. Optimization and Iteration

One of the key advantages of channel marketing is the ability to report and analyze how marketing strategies in one channel influence performance in another. This data provides valuable insights into return on investment. However, you can analyze this data further to boost channel marketing productivity to identify continuous improvement opportunities.

Leverage this data by conducting experiments such as A/B testing in email campaigns, adjusting audience attributes for Facebook Ads, or modifying CTAs' positions. These experiments will yield new and valuable insights about your clients. As you prepare to launch additional channel marketing campaigns, you can enrich each phase with the data you have collected.

Conclusion

Leveraging channel marketing allows your team to execute strong marketing strategies and gain more profound and meaningful insights into client behavior by unifying your data within a Client Data Platform (CDP). This understanding opens up greater opportunities for personalizing your sales, marketing, and Client service interactions for each contact. With access to this data, you will be well-positioned to delight your clients at every stage of their journey, enabling you to expand and grow in any desired direction.