6/08/2013

What is Cross-Channel Marketing?

What is Cross-Channel Marketing?:

from B2B Marketing and Lead Generation | Optify 

cross-channel marketing

A lot of buzzwords and themes float around the digital marketing space these days. That shouldn’t be a surprise — which marketers don’t like to talk? (Starting with our own right here at Optify @dougawheeler!)
Today let’s discuss a term which I see coming up nearly daily, yet seems to mean different things to different folks: cross-channel marketing.
Since some specific definition of cross-channel marketing is central to everything in digital marketing and where the whole industry is headed, it seems pretty important to state what it means here at Optify. The definition shouldn’t take too long, because as with everything we do, we keep it simple.

Digital marketing starts with a website

Our starting point for the definition is more of an organizing theme: digital marketing starts with the website. The website is the nexus of a company’s digital presence and therefore is critical to all digital marketing. Questions about the website that need to have an answer:
  • What does the website do? Is that what it was designed to do?
  • What does it say in terms of content?
  • Is the organization of the site ideal for its goals?
  • How does it perform against its goals or comparable sites?
  • Who visits it? How often do they visit? What actions do they take?

Digital marketers are being charged with results, which means conversions

The corollary to our theme of digital marketing starting with a website is that in ever-increasing numbers, marketers are being required to achieve the goal of a conversion – to a lead in a B2B sense, a subscription/click-thru for a publisher, or an e-commerce transaction for a B2C business.
Gone are the days when agency-managed service initiatives or internal budgets are being funded for interim measures like pageviews, ranks, likes, follows, etc. Those are leading indicator metrics, but ultimately retainer-based fees or increased budgets are allocated for that conversion . . . on the website. To boil it down, budgets are being allocated for the Glengarry leads and nothing less.

Getting back to “cross-channel”

Which brings us right back to our definition of cross-channel marketing. The “cross” in “cross-channel” is where the campaign or initiative ends: at the website. And upon arrival at the website, the objective is a conversion. So any campaign via any channel – PPC, SEO, social, email, webinar, tradeshow, the list goes on – can drive a visitor to a website, but the cross-channel piece is ending up on a website with a conversion as the goal.
So here is the definition of “cross-channel marketing” we drive to here:
“Cross-channel marketing is any campaign from any channel that ultimately drives visitors to the website with an objective of converting that visitor for the core business objective of the website.”

Cross-channel marketing in our product roadmap

Why do we care about cross-channel marketing so much? Our customers are executing cross-channel campaigns every day, that’s why. As every marketer knows today, the big marketplace out there doesn’t operate in silos and point solutions. They don’t just read blogs, or just search on Google, or just read emails, or just follow a Twitter feed. All those pesky people out there really make the marketer’s life complicated by behaving cross-channel every day, all day.
Marketers have to operate cross-channel, which means our digital marketing software must enable cross-channel in a big way. We focus on creating simple and integrated digital marketing software. When we say integrated, it means integrating all of those channels, especially what happens on the website and with a lead/contact in terms of cross-channel touch points. So, yes, we do think about cross-channel marketing every day, all day.
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