Why Multi-Channel Matters When Marketing Your Small Business

Consider the process you take when looking to buy from a business. Do you trust a brand enough to buy from them after the first mention, or do you wait to build up more of an opinion?

The marketing landscape is constantly changing and evolving, and small businesses everywhere now need to be calling upon multi-channel marketing strategies in order to effectively reach their potential customers.

Multi-channel marketing for small businesses

Multi-channel marketing refers to the collaborative approach of marketing your business across multiple channels and platforms. By utilising a number of marketing channels, your business can increase its reach, create a more compelling brand proposition and ensure that your products and services are front of a customer’s mind when they are ready to buy!

This approach to marketing has become increasingly important in recent years due to the evolving nature of buyer demands. Consumer habits are changing, and audiences typically spread their time across multiple channels and are influenced in multiple ways. If your audience is spreading their time across multiple channels, it only makes sense for your business to do the same!

By building your brand and its influence across multiple channels, your marketing efforts will more closely align with the recent behavioural changes in consumer buying.

Think about it – when was the last time you bought from a business at the first mention? Chances are, you are more likely to trust a brand when you’ve seen them across a number of marketing channels, rather than just one.

Multi-channel marketing allows for marketing to be less about a direct sell, and more about telling a brand story and general reputation building. Buyers are influenced by emotions and how you make them feel, which is why they like to buy from brands they trust. Multi-channel marketing lets your small business nurture a relationship with your audience across multiple channels and spread the overall brand story of your business and, at the right time, introduces that sales ad that gets your audience reaching for their credit cards!

Benefits of multi-channel marketing for small businesses

Aside from its ability to build up a strong foundation for your brand story, there are a number of reasons that make multi-channel marketing crucial for small businesses.

Increasing reach to your audience

Spreading your marketing efforts over multiple channels is one of the best ways to increase audience reach. Today, if you are marketing over only one channel, you are missing sales opportunities. Multi-channel strategies allow you to touch base with audiences who are interacting with all different sorts of media and marketing material, reaching possible buyers who otherwise would not hear of your business. This allows you to reach the same customers multiple times, reinforcing your messaging and building trust in your brand.

Additionally, certain digital channels such as Facebook and Google advertising have retargeting capabilities, allowing you to present your ads specifically to those people who have visited you online, but haven’t completed the action you want them to do – for example, making a purchase. Retargeting is a great way  to continue the conversation and foster a relationship with those audiences who have already interacted with your business, ultimately leading to improved conversion rates.

Generating leads and collecting data

This is another benefit of multi-channel marketing strategies that pays dividends in the long run. With a number of digital marketing strategies running simultaneously, you will be able to generate lead enquiries and heaps of important data that you can utilise in your future campaigns.

Not only will you be provided with analytics from a number of channels that let you know how your business is performing, the consumer information you gather will allow you to improve your future marketing efforts. When optimised correctly, your digital strategies can leave you with lists of potential customer contacts who you can revisit with phone calls or direct mail pieces further down the line, as part of your overall multi-channel marketing strategy.

Optimising your budget and return on investment

Multi-channel marketing gives small businesses a great opportunity to closely monitor their budget and optimise their return on investment. When businesses focus their efforts only on one channel of advertising, they often lack a benchmark to compare against in terms of spend vs. success rates, making it hard to know where their budget should be utilised the most to get the best returns!

HOW CAN GDR HELP?

Not only does an effective multi-channel strategy reach a range of new audiences, but it fosters trust in your existing audiences and further builds on the relationship they have with your brand.

At GDR, we understand the importance of using multi-channel marketing strategies to increase the influence of your business and drive sales.

We can deliver a multi-channel marketing strategy for your business which will:

• Increase reach to audiences over a range of different channels
• Tell your brand story and build trust in your potential buyers
• Gather important data that can be utilised in future marketing efforts
• Optimise and track return on investment

We’d love to help!