All effective marketing campaigns include cross-channel advertising. In the digital age, consumers are very mobile and quickly jump from one channel to another. If you don’t follow them, you lose the connection.
Fortunately, launching cross-channel advertising for an integrated experience is easy with modern marketing tools. They allow connecting multiple digital platforms and automatically do a great deal of work. You only need to set up workflows to indicate what customer activities must trigger ads.
This article provides practical tips on this type of advertising. Learn how to do it and what tools to use.
What is Cross-Channel Advertising?
Cross-channel advertising is a marketing approach that implies launching an advertising campaign across more than one channel. The company stays in touch with customers wherever they go by showing them ads. For example, you can track users after they leave the landing page to show them digital ads on social media.
Such campaigns heavily depend on marketing automation tools that monitor users and nurture them with relevant content. Without automation, this type of advertising would have low efficiency and take too much time.
Why Is It Important?
When you reach the same customer through multiple channels, you have more opportunities to make your offer noticeable. After interacting with your social media post, the person may leave and forget about you. Yet, if you unobtrusively remind them about your brand with ads across the customer journey, the targeted customers become more likely to convert. Here are some other reasons to launch cross-channel marketing campaigns:
Reach people at the right time: it enables you to reach consumers when they leisurely browse Facebook or Instagram. Or when they search for similar products in Google Search. These are the moments when customers are open to your offer and ready to convert.
Show relevant offers: cross-channel advertising is data-driven. It means the ads are based on previous actions of customers and include the content the people have interacted with. If someone has added a product to favorites, ads are the best way to nudge them to purchase.
Easily reach people at an affordable cost: it doesn’t require considerable investment and starts paying off pretty quickly. It makes a cross-channel campaign suitable for any business, whether a startup or a large ecommerce store. You can start with a basic advertising plan and pour more money into it as your sales grow.
Make retargeting more effective: no other marketing approach is as good for retargeting as digital marketing ads. You can track what content people interact with to show them the same or similar offers later. It’s a perfect choice to reactivate dormant customers and retarget occasional visitors. PS: If you want to learn more about retargeting and how to do it without cookies, we’ve talked about it here.
How It Works
As mentioned, cross-channel advertising is particularly effective for retargeting customers. Let’s see how it works in practice based on the example.
Suppose you run an ecommerce store selling Halloween costumes. You know that almost 70% of shopping carts are abandoned and, unfortunately, your store is not an exception. People browse your products, add costumes to the cart, and unexpectedly leave. Looking for ways to get them back, you decide to launch a cross-channel advertising campaign.
You implement software that tracks user behavior using cookies to detect customers that abandon carts. It captures the products they have added to the cart and keeps tracking them as they move to a different channel. When the person navigates another channel, be it a mobile app or Instagram, the software automatically triggers the ad with the products previously added to the cart.
People leave carts for various reasons. They may get distracted, discouraged with shipping costs, go to a competitor’s store, etc. Once you analyze their behavior and show them the relevant ad, they may change their mind and return. The process of converting such customers is called remarketing.
The described use case is not the only possible option, of course. You can use cross-channel remarketing to make people view your YouTube video content, remind them about unfinished registration, promote new services, and more. This approach is highly effective, since people rarely convert on the first page they visit. By remarketing, you give them more occasions to complete the conversion.
How to Do Cross-Channel Advertising
To design a successful strategy, you need some preparation. Follow these steps to launch a campaign bringing remarkable results.
1. Decide what channels to focus on
If your audience resides on YouTube, there is no need to promote yourself on landing pages and vice versa. So marketing research should be the first step in implementing cross-channel advertising. It will allow you to choose appropriate advertising software and avoid unnecessary expenses.
2. Collect customer data and segment the audience
To ensure a seamless customer experience for your leads, you must know their preferences. Hence, before launching digital ads, you must collect detailed behavioral data. It will allow you to segment all customers into specific audiences to target promotions more accurately.
3. Choose marketing software to reach the necessary customer groups
Google Ads is the most popular tool for reaching people through online advertising channels. It supports a remarketing tag specifically designed to target ads to selected visitors.
But if you want to outperform competitors, we recommend combining Google Ads with customer behavior analytics software. In particular, you can use Verfacto to create custom audiences and push them directly to Google Ads or other advertising platforms. Verfacto has over 20 attributes, allowing it to detect the stage of the customer journey to show tailored ads. Read more about this software combination in our previous blog post.
4. Track the results and improve.
Continuous analysis is essential in any marketing campaign as it helps you improve the results. After launching, monitor the main KPIs to see how they change. You should also keep tracking users’ behavior to understand how they respond to ads.
The Best Platforms for this Type of Advertising
You need to combine several tools for a genuinely remarkable cross-channel advertising campaign. A single platform may not cover all the channels you want to target. Below, we will list the best solutions in different categories.
Google Ads to run ads in the Google Search network
Google Ads (previously Google Adwords) is a fundamental tool for online advertising. Here you can bid to display ads, service offerings, or videos to users across Google products. These are the ads we see when googling something, visiting third-party landing pages, or watching YouTube videos.
Verfacto for customer journey analytics and profiling
Verfacto runs customer behavior tracking and supports various integrations for advanced campaigns. It connects anonymous actions with specific users across devices to generate detailed customer profiles. You can use these findings to make ads highly targeted and relevant.
Klaviyo for email and SMS ads
Klaviyo has rich email advertising functionality, enabling you to send trigger-based ads to emails or phones. Thus, if you view emails as the main advertising channel, Klaviyo is a convenient platform to set up an automated campaign.
AdEspresso to create and tests adds
AdEspresso is a single platform for Facebook, Instagram, and Google Ads. It lets you create and split test ads to see how they perform to choose the most suitable option. AdEspresso lacks customer analytics but is an excellent option for simple campaigns.
Acquisio for PPC management
Acquisio is a tool for AI-powered PPC campaigns. You can use it to automate dynamic search engine campaigns based on product feeds, clone Google Ads to Bing Ads, define campaign goals for the algorithms, and more. The platform would be the most beneficial for targeting consumers through Google and Bing.
How to Choose the Best Platform
The above list highlights only a few popular tools. There are many other options to consider for your campaign. Here are some tips to help you pick the most suitable software:
Analyze your existing and potential business needs. You must choose a platform that meets your current needs and allows you to scale in the future.
Estimate your budget. Decide how much you can spend on promotional campaigns to realize what subscription plan you can afford.
Pay attention to supported software integrations. As you may need to connect several tools, ensure they go well with each other.
Make sure the platform is secure and doesn’t collect private data. Avoid breaching user privacy by choosing a tool that tracks users without gathering unnecessary data like cookies.
Read reviews. Learn what current users like and don’t like about the platform you consider. You can find some valuable insight that will affect your choice.
Conclusion
Cross-channel advertising is a subtype of cross-channel marketing intended for companies that want to reach consumers through ads. Personalization, relevance, and efficiency are the main benefits of this approach that make it worth launching. So if you feel inspired to run a promo campaign across multiple channels, start the customer research and integrate the necessary software now.
FAQs
What are cross-channel attribution models?
Cross-channel attribution models are rules that determine how credit for sales and conversions is assigned across touchpoints throughout the conversion path. They help understand which channel is the most effective and generates the most sales.
What are the best channels to advertise?
Email marketing, social media, Google Search, in-app ads, and mobile messaging are the best digital advertising channels. They have the most users and are easy to integrate with each other. Besides digital marketing, you can also send offline ads through direct mail. When relevant, leaflets and flyers may be a great way to nurture leads.