Employing multiple marketing channels to increase your brand’s reach and visibility? Great tactic! However, simply setting up these channels shouldn’t be the be-all-end-all of your marketing strategy. Imagine this- a prospective customer chances upon your Instagram handle and is impressed by your posts; they’re informative, conversational, and very engaging. Subsequently, they sign up for your newsletter, too, only to be put off by the content and tonality that greets them over there. But, what’s to say that the disappointment of your newsletter won’t cause them to disengage from your brand altogether.
Basically, the takeaway from this illustration is that establishing multiple marketing channels will bear you fruit only if you ensure consistent messaging across them all. Allowing your channels to exist as independent entities that are disconnected from the happenings of one another will only bring you more harm than good.
What Is Silo Marketing?
The scenario that we highlighted above is an accurate example of silo marketing- all the channels are isolated; the insights derived from one marketing channel are neither taken into account nor integrated with another. None of the constituent units of your marketing department communicate with one another, meaning there’s absolutely no exchange of ideas and reflections. The silo approach, therefore, when it comes to marketing is largely frowned upon because it drastically hinders the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
How Silos Can Hamper Your Business
When you see a single marketing channel prospering and thriving, you want to capitalize on it to the maximum possible extent- this is the primary reason why most businesses fall prey to the clutches of silo marketing. In the process of extracting short-term gains from one channel, they overlook the long-term dividends that they could have obtained by leveraging other channels. It is essential for marketers, thus, to not only factor in all their marketing channels while executing a campaign but also to have a unified goal in mind.
Silos can hamper your business in the following ways:
Inconsistent Customer Experience
When none of your channels have any clue about the kind of traffic and engagement that each of them is receiving, they’ll never be able to deliver a unified and seamless experience to your customers. As a result, your buyers might either need to start from scratch when they hop from one channel to another or receive communication that is entirely irrelevant to them. Consider this scenario- you’re launching a new service, and you want your writing team to come up with a host of promotional blogs for your website; you brief them about the same. However, since your social media team has no idea about this development, they carry on with their business as usual. Meanwhile, the team working on Google Ads is busy promoting a different product altogether.
Now, imagine this from the customer’s perspective. When they visit your website, they’re alerted to the launch of a new service via your blog. To find out more about the same, they decide to look up your social media profiles, only to find no mention of it over there. This makes them doubt what they read on your website. And to top it off, the targeted ads (from the Google Ads team) sent their way revolve around a completely different product altogether. All of this is highly confusing and disorienting for your buyers. Such an experience will prompt them to either stop engaging with your business or unsubscribe from your communications. At the end of the day, there is only one outcome- poor and inconsistent customer experience.
When your marketing department is siloed, there might also be instances where different fonts and colors are used across various channels, leading to an inconsistent brand image. All silos do, essentially, are breed confusing situations, thereby robbing your business of genuine engagement opportunities. Consequently, this leads to reduced brand loyalty and ultimately lesser conversions and sales.
Excessive And Redundant Work
When there’s no coordination between the different departments of your marketing team, there’s no way of keeping a tab on the tasks that the team has accomplished as a whole. As a result, much time is wasted attending to tasks that might have already been taken care of. Let’s say you open a website for your business and populate it with high-quality, engaging, and SEO-optimized content.
However, a few weeks down the line, you notice that the blog is not amassing as much traffic as it should have. So, what went wrong? Turns out, while your content is undoubtedly top-notch, it is not at all palatable to your business target demographic. If only the writing team had once consulted the sales team to find out about the same. Now, all the content has to be done from scratch. Situations like these not only pile up your workload but also considerably demotivate your employees.
How Cross-channel Marketing Can Help
Cross-channel marketing helps you foster an interconnectedness between your different marketing channels, which breaks marketing silos and ultimately powers you to deliver an integrated and personalized experience to customers and prospects alike.
Take a look at this example. Revolve has used consistent messaging across channels to deliver a great customer experience.
Listed below are a few more ways in which cross-channel marketing comes to the rescue.
Consolidated and Centralized Data
Every cross-channel marketing strategy hinges religiously around data, and the best part is that the data repositories are made accessible to all the marketing channels in the setup. Because there’s an exchange of data and insights between the participating channels, they continuously build off one another. From a customers’ perspective, they’re spared from the trouble of starting from scratch upon switching from one channel to the next. This heightens their user experience by leaps and bounds.
Unified Experience Across All Channels
In a cross-channel marketing setup, the participating channels complement one another, allowing businesses to deliver a unified experience. Suppose you visited the website of an online grocery store and browsed their dairy section. Next, you’ll receive a product recommendation email highlighting their best-selling dairy products. This mail, in turn, will have a CTA button that’ll lead you to their mobile application or website where you can complete the transaction.
Customer Satisfaction
Cross-channel marketing allows you to intercept your customers with the right message at the right time irrespective of the channel with which they’re interacting with you. Because the communications are targeted and personalized, brands enjoy significantly higher customer satisfaction levels.
Better Brand Recognition And Recall
Your business has a diverse range of customers who get exposed to your products and services through different marketing channels. Cross-channel marketing allows you to deliver a unified experience across all channels, thereby ensuring that you remain in the back of your customers’ minds at all times. This brings about dramatic improvements in your brand recognition and recall.
Wrapping Up
With marketing campaigns growing more and more customer-centric with every passing day, cross-channel marketing has now become the need of the hour. To help you gain an in-depth understanding of the same, we compiled this insightful infographic with the help of our friends at Cordial. Hope it helps!
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