Multi-channel marketing can help increase brand visibility and reach. This is a great tactic! This is a great tactic! Imagine this: A potential customer stumbles upon your Instagram account and is impressed by the posts. They are informative, conversational and engaging. They sign up for your newsletter and are immediately disappointed by the tone and content. However, they won’t be disengaged from your brand because of the newsletter’s disappointment.
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This illustration shows that multiple marketing channels can only be successful if they are consistent in their messaging. Your channels should not be considered separate entities and you will do more harm than good.
What is Silo Marketing?
This is silo marketing. All channels are considered separate and the insights from each channel are not taken into consideration nor integrated with the others. Your marketing departments don’t communicate with each other, so there is no exchange of ideas or reflections. Silos in marketing are greatly discouraged as it severely hinders effectiveness.
How Silos Can Hamper Your Business
If you see one marketing channel succeeding, you want it to thrive to its fullest. This is why silo marketing is so popular in businesses. They focus on short-term gains and neglect the long-term benefits that can be derived from other channels. Marketers must consider all channels when executing campaigns. They also need to have a common goal.
Silos can hinder your business in these ways:
Unconsistent Customer Experience
If your channels don’t know what kind of traffic or engagement they are receiving, they won’t be able deliver a seamless customer experience. Your buyers may have to either start over or get communication that is completely irrelevant to them from different channels. Let’s say you launch a new service and want your writing team create a series of promotional blogs for it. You brief them about this. Your social media team doesn’t know about this development and they continue to run their business as normal. While this happens, your Google Ads team is busy promoting another product.
Now imagine the customer’s view. They are alerted via your blog to the launch of a new service when they visit your site. They decide to search your social media profiles to learn more. They are now skeptical about what they have read on your website. To top it all, the targeted ads sent by the Google Ads team revolve around a completely separate product. This is confusing and disorienting to your customers. This will cause them to unsubscribe or stop engaging with you business. There is only one outcome: poor customer service.
If your marketing department is not cohesive, you might find instances when different fonts or colors are used across multiple channels. This can lead to inconsistent brand images. Silos can lead to confusing situations that will rob your business of real engagement opportunities. This results in lower brand loyalty, and ultimately less conversions and sales.
Excessive and redundant work
If there is no coordination among the various departments within your marketing team, it’s difficult to keep track of the tasks the entire team has completed. This results in a lot of wasted time on tasks that could have been done already. Let’s suppose you create a website for your company and fill it with engaging, high-quality and SEO-optimized material.
But, after a few weeks, you realize that the blog isn’t getting as much traffic as it should. What went wrong? It turns out that while your content may be top-notch, it’s not palatable for your target audience. It would have been nice if the writing team had consulted the sales team. All content must be created from scratch. These situations not only increase your workload, but can also demotivate your employees.
Cross-channel marketing can help
Cross-channel marketing allows you to foster a connection between your marketing channels. This breaks down marketing silos and empowers you to provide a personalized and integrated experience to prospects and customers.
This is an example. Revolve uses consistent messaging across channels in order to provide a great customer experience.
Here are some more examples of cross-channel marketing that can help.
Consolidated and Centralized Data
Cross-channel marketing strategies are based on data. The best part about cross-channel marketing is that all marketing channels have access to the data repositories. They build on each other because there is an exchange of data, insights and information between participating channels. Customers don’t have to start over every time they switch channels. This increases their user experience by leaps, bounds.
Unified Experience across All Channels
Cross-channel marketing allows businesses to offer a seamless experience because the channels they use complement each other. Let’s say you visit an online grocery store website and browse their dairy section. The next step is to receive an email with product recommendations that highlight their top-selling dairy products. The mail will contain a CTA button which will take you to their website or mobile app where you can complete your transaction.
Customer Satisfaction
Cross-channel marketing lets you reach your customers using the right message at just the right moment, regardless of their channel. Brands enjoy higher customer satisfaction because the communications are personalized and targeted.
Improved Brand Recognition and Recall
There are many customers in your business who are exposed to your products through various marketing channels. Cross-channel marketing allows for a consistent experience across all channels. This ensures that your brand remains top of mind with customers at all times. This will result in a dramatic increase in brand recognition and recall.
Wrapping up
Cross-channel marketing is becoming more important as marketing campaigns become more customer-centric every day. This infographic was created by Cordial to help you understand the subject better. We hope you find it helpful!
Scoop.it Blog: How Marketing Silos can Harm Your Business and How to Break Them with Cross-channel Marketing
Did you miss our previous article…
https://onlinemarketingagencies.net/the-web-accessibility-checklist-digital-marketers-need-to-have/
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