Why You Need a Multi-channel Paid Ads Strategy

The Evolving Customer Journey

No matter how much the digital landscape changes, multi-channel marketing is just as relevant in 2024 as it was in 2013. Over the years trends have changed in the digital space with platforms like TikTok seeing huge growth, Twitter becoming X, and Meta constantly evolving into new technologies.

With so much choice, it can be difficult to know where to start when it comes to choosing a cohesive set of platforms for your paid ads marketing strategy. Here we will look at the benefits, key channels and how to implement an effective multichannel strategy.

Multiple Touchpoints Across Channels

The modern consumer connects with brands at many different points throughout their experience. A multi-channel strategy uses a mix of digital channels, such as websites, apps and social media,to create multiple touchpoints for your consumer. They also connect with brands outside of the digital space in the form of physical locations, traditional media and customer service channels.

On average a consumer can take up to 8 interactions on more than one paid ads channel before making a decision. This gives us the freedom to design campaigns that integrate across platforms, but require the delivery of consistent branding, messaging and service quality across all channels. The consumer experience depends on every channel, not just an individual one.

Increased Consumer Research Before Purchase

One thing we must also bear in mind is that the modern day consumer will spend a considerable amount of time researching a product, and often comparing it with other products, before they make a purchase. The digital space enables them to research on more channels than ever before which allows a consumer to dig for as much information as they can in the form of reviews and compare options. The use of multiple channels in consumer research gives us a scope of how many touchpoints are used that we can be advertising across.

The Role of Mobile Devices and Expectation for Personalised Experiences

There are over 7.2 billion smartphones in the world, generating 63% of global website traffic. This has changed the way the mobile consumers interact with brands and increased the need for mobile optimization. A purchase can be made at any time from anywhere in the world and shopping experiences can vary on customer location. If a consumer connects with different devices and different apps in their buying process, this creates a wide range of touchpoints for brand interaction. By considering these touchpoints, and using improved platform personalisation options, a brand can create more multi channel personalised experiences.

The Benefits of a Multichannel Approach

A multi channel approach enables a brand to build a stronger market presence and relationship with it’s audience. Research demonstrates that companies achieve up to a 300% increase in ROI with 4 or more channels.

Increased Brand Visibility and Recall

A multi channel strategy allows a brand to reach consumers throughout the marketing funnel, increasing brand visibility across multiple platforms. The expanded reach therefore allows businesses to connect with current and potential customers across multiple platforms. It also allows us to be dynamic with our campaigns and tailor our campaigns to the audience. Where you’re trying to improve brand recall, increased reach and visibility is key.

Improved Customer Engagement

Multi channel strategies create and build between customer relationships and engagement. As customer engagement and interaction grows, brand awareness and recognition should improve, with studies indicating that 86% of markets have seen increased customer engagement through multi channel strategies. Your overall brand loyalty will increase and your customer relationships become stronger.

Enhanced Data Collection and Insights

There’s 3 ways that we can effectively use data to understand our customers better through multi channel marketing. We can study how customers interact on each platform and identify differences which can help to shape our overall strategy. We can also study customer buying patterns through platforms such as GA4, with detailed attribution data.

We can evaluate overall campaign results, looking at a wider cross channel picture and perspective, getting a better understanding of our audience.
Looking at these 3 things allows us to be dynamic with our marketing strategies, navigating the changing trends and tailoring to the evolving needs of the audience.

Increased Conversion Rate

An increase in consumer touchpoints with a multi channel strategy will lead to a decrease in the time taken by the consumer to make a decision, therefore likely resulting in the consumer converting faster. Research has also indicated that it also leads to higher conversion rates. Retargeting is a huge contributor to this, and we can use this to our advantage across channels, avoiding being overly aggressive with retargeting on a single channel.

Driving messages across different channels creates more opportunities for consumers to interact and convert. This also means that potential customers can see a brands ads across their preferred channels, increasing their chances of conversion.

Key Channels for a Multichannel Strategy

When it comes to selecting channels for your multi channel strategy, we need to take into consideration the audience but also the number of channels and how they can be integrated into the same strategy. Actively using 3 or 4 channels can achieve optimal results but larger brands and brands with higher spends will use up to 8 for the maximum exposure.

Social Media Platforms

Social media is one of the most prominent and accessible channels for brands to advertise on and is especially good for gathering audience data and understanding. Over 77% of internet users are active on at least one of the Meta platforms and the average time spent on tiktok in a day is 66 minutes. It’s important to consider all platforms for both organic and paid.

Email Marketing

For every 1.54 AUD invested in email marketing, businesses generate an average return of $64.66. Email marketing delivers strong results when combined with other channels to ensure the combination create an individual experience and better response rate. Email marketing can be especially effective with remarketing as you can target certain situations such as abandoned carts. Email gives a brand an opportunity to take a more personalised approach.

Content Marketing and SEO

As important as a paid strategy is, there are certain foundations that have to be laid in content marketing and SEO (can we hyperlink). Content marketing can build intellectual influence, drive organic traffic and support other channel initiatives, all at a much lower investment that methods such as PPC. When aligned with a paid strategy, content marketing can be invaluable to a brand.

PPC

Paid advertising is the door to instant visibility and more often than not, reliable results. You may be able to convert a few, but you can’t effectively convert every consumer all on one platform. When strategized effectively, a mix of paid media channels can help you to ensure that you are covering all areas of the marketing funnel and hitting as many as 8 customer touchpoints across platforms.

For example, google search campaigns drive leads and sales but someone must be actively searching for your product or service. Whilst your costs may be lower, you’re not broadening your audience reach and therefore your brand is more stagnating than growing. In order to expand your reach on the Google network you should be considering adding YouTube and Display to the mix or leveraging the Performance Max campaign type in order to achieve a wider reach. This in turn means broadening your audience and in the longer term, making further connections that will turn into conversions later down the line.

Traditional Channels

Despite the fast changing digital environment, traditional channels should remain a part of your multichannel strategy. They can help to boost ad recall and they enable you to create a resilient marketing eco system. Traditional media is still evolving with tv campaigns aligning to social media campaign content and the rise of QR codes in print media. Traditional media helps to ensure you are delivering a consistent message and brand experience offline as well as online.

Implementing an Effective Multichannel Strategy

In order to implement an effective multi channel marketing strategy it needs to be careful planned and executed to ensure there is a cohesive approach across your channels. It’s important to ensure that everything remains consistent such as your messaging and customer experience and be prepared to be dynamic as your strategy will need continuous refinement in order to ensure that it delivers optimal results.

Defining Clear Goals and KPIs

It’s key to set clear goals and KPIs as measurable goals are a key factor in multichannel success. Research indicates that companies with well-defined KPIs are 2 and a half times more likely to achieve their marketing goals.
Key KPIS you should consider tracking that drive multichannel strategies are:

• Conversion rates across channels
• Customer acquisition costs
• Channel attribution and cross channel attribution
• Customer lifetime value
• Cross-channel engagement

Creating consistent brand messaging and a continuous customer experience

As previously mentioned, with a multi channel approach it is vital that you have consistent brand messaging across your channels as this impacts your customer trust and recognition. Consistent brand presentation across all channels create a See our guide to a strong approach to brand messaging below:

Element	Implementation Guide
Voice & Tone	Maintain a uniform communication style
Visual Identity	Use consistent colours, logos, and design elements
Core Messages	Line up value propositions across channels
Content Strategy	Coordinate themes and campaigns

The correct channel integration links in with the consistent brand messaging as these both contribute to a seamless experience through the channel integrations. These days a consistent experience across channels is expected by 75% of consumers and there’s a few things that we should be prioritising when strategising.

• Creating unified customer profiles
• Synchronising data across platforms
• Maintaining consistent information for example with ecommerce with inventory
• Co-ordinating promotional activity

Leveraging Data for Personalisation

Data personalisation is much more accessible and is another vital part of the implementation of an effective strategy. Whilst it can be hard to use customer data consistently across channels, there are ways to make the most of the data that you can get from advertising channels.
There are integrated systems that process data immediately and tools that monitor customer behaviour. There are also analytics that predict the outcomes and engines that automate personalised content. Most advertising platforms have means of using previously collected customer data, enabling us to effectively retargeting and further build audiences.

Continuous Testing and Optimisation

In order to execute a successful strategy you must be continuously testing and optimising your campaigns. Research shows that companies regularly testing multichannel strategies, achieve a 60% lift in digital revenue. Some of the main things we focus on at Gordon digital when optimising are:

• A/B testing different campaign elements
• Performance monitoring in channels and across channels to look at overall change impact
• Customer experience and trip analysis
• Regular content and account audits

Testing and optimisation need to be a regular, consistent part of a strategy using learnings from every platform to enhance your customer experience. Learnings you can use to dictate your optimisation includes overall performance analysis. Audience data from each platform can help to refine your targeting parameters. Keeping up to date and on top of emerging trends, platforms and technologies is also key.

Conclusion

It’s pretty much impossible to run a successful campaign using just one media channel. Companies who coordinate their presence across multiple channels, see exceptional results in the form of an increase in ROI and an increase in customer spending. The path to success requires planning and consistent execution whilst implementing evidence based improvements.

Choosing the right platforms and managing multiple channels requires time and expertise. If you’re ready to reap the benefits of a multi-channel paid ads strategy, book a consultation with Gordon Digital and let our experts develop an effective strategy that is tailored to your specific needs.