Think about your average weekday. Like most people you probably wake up to the sound of your phone's alarm, snooze it a few times (we're not judging), before picking it up and starting your day. Once the phone's in your hands, you'll probably check emails and begin a quick scroll through your preferred social media apps.
If you workout in the morning, you might have a soundtrack courtesy of Spotify, Apple, or Pandora or you listen to a podcast while you push through the burn of some cardio. You may switch over to television while you eat breakfast, or continue streaming. If, like most people, you commute to work, you might continue streaming audio or tune into the radio. Regardless of how you're listening, you're bound to see some billboards on the drive into work.
Odds are your customer's mornings look a lot like yours. That means by the time they've reached their workplace to "start their day," they've already engaged with multiple marketing channels. Their email, a social media scroll, streaming audio, radio, television, and out-of-home are all places where your brand and message could appear, but do they?
What Is Multichannel Marketing?
Multichannel Marketing, sometimes known as cross-channel marketing, is a marketing strategy that employs multiple channels to drive customer engagement and conversions. At its simplest, think of it like being part of your target customer's daily routine.
When businesses embrace a multichannel marketing strategy, they select various channels, like television, out-of-home, and social media, to deliver their message. If a business were to pour their entire marketing budget into one channel, it would be like a restaurant offering one item. It might appeal to some, but they'll miss out loads of potential customers.
How Cross-Channel Marketing Optimizes Your Budget
For small and medium sized businesses trying to run marketing campaigns in between other compelling tasks, using one channel with the broadest possible reach is appealing. In fact, 43% of SMBs use two or fewer marketing channels. The desire to simply reach more people perhaps explains this trend. Eventually though, you'll reach all your customers on the one or two channels, if they were ever there to begin with.
"Employing a multichannel marketing strategy shifts your focus from the individual marketing tactics to the actual customer," says Digital Fulfillment Director Shajan Thomas.
Instead of just trying to reach more people on a single channel, you think about who your customers are, and where they go, both online and offline. The result is a marketing budget that goes further and has a greater return on investment. Rather than having your marketing message fall mostly on deaf ears, you can reach the people most likely to purchase.
Multichannel Means More Reach and Frequency
Thinking of multichannel marketing reminds Thomas that it takes hearing a message at least 7 times before we recognize that it's important. Multichannel marketing offers the best chance that customers will hear your message enough times to take action. Every channel has a different reach, a marketer's way of saying audience, that marketing managers account for when allocating their budget.
Say you're considering a single channel, like social media, and you want to reach as many people as possible on that channel. In that case, you'd select LinkedIn long before you considered Snapchat because LinkedIn reaches 82.2% of customers. But is LinkedIn where your customers are? If it is, great choice, but how often are people checking LinkedIn?
If all your marketing efforts are on one site, then odds are your message won't be seen enough to drive conversions. On the other hand, the average American checks their email 15 times per day. If your message is in your target audience's inbox, surely there's a better chance they'll see those crucial 7 times. Great, right?
But frequency can be a double-edged sword. Sending the same email to a customer 15 times a day so they see it a few times is a surefire way to get them to unsubscribe. The same is true for running the same exact commercial 15 times during one show. So how do you ensure your customers see your message frequently without being intrusive?
The answer is a multichannel marketing approach. The inherent differences in each channel should alter how you deliver your message. The language in your texts is different from your emails, right? The same should hold in your marketing. Thomas loves multichannel marketing because it pushes him to "creatively say the same thing in different ways." According to Thomas, that varied messaging spurs greater brand recall while avoiding annoyance.
Multichannel Marketing Reflects Your Customer's Journey
Thinking back to your customer's morning routine, it's easy to see how multichannel marketing ensures that your message reaches them. But marketing isn't all just about reach and frequency. If it was, then we'd be back to finding the channel with the broadest reach. Marketing is about delivering the right message at the right time, too.
A cross-channel approach increases the likelihood that your message will reach the customer at the time—and platform—where they make buying decisions. Thomas asks his clients, "Where does this consumer live - device wise?"
Studies show that a combination of television and email marketing can increase conversions. But why? More than mere repetition, a cross-channel marketing campaign succeeds because many consumers don't purchase with their television, but will buy using the same device they use to check email.
Using Cross Channel Marketing Reduces Risk
Imagine if your company dedicated its entire 2025 marketing budget to TikTok in November 2024. The chaos and uncertainty surrounding the app's fate in the US would set your entire marketing plan on fire. Hopefully, that's not what brought you to this blog.
While TikTok may be an extreme example, major shake-ups in third-party data, new regulations, and algorithm updates occur often. You can insulate your business's marketing effectiveness from this uncertainty by using cross-channel marketing campaigns. The impact of a change, however major, to one channel is blunted by the diversity of channels you use.
Boost Effectiveness Through Multichannel Marketing
Using multichannel marketing campaigns is more effective than a single strategy because they reach your customers enough times to drive action on the platforms they use to buy. This is true for SMBs in the B2C and B2B spaces. But more than driving conversions, multichannel campaigns are more sustainable.
In a single-channel campaign all your data comes from that single source. This certainly keeps things simple, but it doesn't reveal much. Conversion and engagement data from one channel can only tell you how well that one message is doing one platform. It doesn't tell you if you're reaching potential customers who don't resonate with the message. Without this data you might walk away with the wrong idea of who your customer is in the first place.
With multiple touch points spread throughout the customer journey, you get access to insights that no single channel can provide. You may discover television outperforming all other channels, unexpectedly. This could introduce you to an entirely new customer segment than you'd otherwise have, all thanks to multichannel marketing.
Let CMG Local Solutions Handle Your Multichannel Marketing
For many small and medium sized businesses, marketing needs come down to two issues: time and money. It's why they invest heavily on social media advertising. The ease with which even the most time-crunched small business owners can post and promote is appealing. But nearly a quarter of small business owners are still concerned with their marketing budgets.
The problem is clear then. While posting and promoting are time effective and seemingly cheap, they eat up more of the budget without delivering results. Despite widespread adoption and use of social media sites, overreliance on this single channel has reached its limit. You may know you need a multichannel approach, but the data, messaging, and channel selection all seem too complex.
That's why CMG Local Solutions is here to demystify multichannel marketing and help you stretch your marketing budget further. While you focus on your morning routine, we're crafting and deploying creative messaging that resonates with your customers. Whether they watch the local news as they get ready, pop in a podcast to get the day started, or clear out their inboxes with coffee, we're visible in all these channels and touchpoints.
Contact us today to drive conversions with a new multichannel marketing strategy.
