Nowadays, customers are the ones who can influence how marketers approach their intended audience. But with everything from radio and TV to print and digital magazines to social media, we are all overloaded with information these days. As a result, the typical consumer sees hundreds of brand messages daily.
So, a business cannot afford to use a single channel for marketing, so it must focus on cross-channel lead generation if it wants to produce a tailored customer experience that resonates with its target audience.
Let’s see how these cross-channel marketing strategies can revolutionize lead-generation initiatives and yield measurable outcomes.
What Does Cross-Channel Lead Generation Mean?
A tried-and-true strategy for leveraging many marketing channels to interact with audiences, impact a customer journey, and turn audiences into sales is called cross-channel lead generation.
It combines several marketing channels to accomplish a shared objective and provide a unified brand experience. In fact, you should collaborate to develop a cohesive message that flows from one channel to the next.
This way, marketers can use people-based marketing to create detailed customer profiles by interacting with them at various touchpoints. Marketers can maximize their return on investment by determining which channels are best suited for targeting particular consumer categories. Referral marketing tools are particularly effective for engaging customers who rely on word-of-mouth recommendations.
Using the appropriate combination of channels, such as email marketing, customer referrals, social media marketing and more, guarantees that messages are sent to suitable audiences at the appropriate times and in the right circumstances.
Benefits of Incorporating a Cross-Channel Lead Generation Strategy
Irrespective of the industry, every business must cultivate an in-depth comprehension of its target audience to thrive in the current competitive environment.
You may accomplish this while keeping the kind of relationship that today's customers demand from you and achieving outcomes through cross-channel lead generation. But there’s more to it, such as:
- Increases customer conversion: You can increase the likelihood of prospective consumers becoming paying customers by reaching them via various channels. You can use a variety of channels to reach customers who are more likely to convert, as different customer types may respond differently to different kinds of content.
Even the HubSpot State of Marketing Report 2022 found that creating more leads is the top marketing priority for marketers for 2023, among a few other priorities.
- Boosts engagement rates: To effectively engage an audience in today's age, you must go out there, meet them where they are, and present your material to them rather than wait for them to find you.
Engaging interactions foster interpersonal relationships between consumers and brands, which are frequently the decisive factor in converting those you want to reach into brand advocates.
Customers interact with companies through many channels, so putting your company's name in front of them is more effective than waiting for them to discover you to drive a successful interaction.
- Improves customer loyalty: The possibility that a specific customer will think of your brand when they're ready to invest in a solution—is supported by effectively managing an immersive online presence across numerous channels.
Generally speaking, customers want a good reason to return. For many customers, even if it costs a little bit extra, it's just easier to upgrade or add services from a supplier they already know and trust rather than looking for someone else who can accomplish the same task. As shown by your cohesive marketing and customer service initiatives, you stay at the top of the consumers' minds as an authority when you have their trust and truly want to see them succeed.
- Stay updated with changes: With cross-channel lead generation, you may modify your strategies in response to how various channels perform. For instance, you can concentrate your efforts on a specific channel and modify your strategy if it produces more leads than the others.
However, when it comes to communication channels, people's tastes vary. Giving your clients the freedom to select where they want to have their conversation with you is a win, as it allows them to select the most convenient option for them. Additionally, it communicates to them your commitment to fulfilling their needs, which is essential for fostering a lifetime relationship with them.
- Maximizes ROI: It's possible to map out touchpoints and observe how a lead became a customer by combining your marketing across channels. Next, you can offer your target audience the message on every channel by contextualizing and personalizing it.
Each of these channels wants to get credited for generating leads or closing deals, and they will often use their own metrics to demonstrate their impact. Each channel may be contextualized by combining efforts across channels, which allows you to clearly map out the many touch points and understand how a lead became a customer.
Now, you know how cross-channel lead generation can bring you the success you want. Let’s explore the steps you must take to set up such a strategy in your business.
Step-by-Step Process of Setting Up a Cross-Channel Lead Generation Strategy
Gartner reports that 40% of marketers say their greatest challenge involves using cutting-edge strategies to reach their target audience at the right time.
No one, not even your customers, can be everywhere these days due to the sheer number of communication lines available.
To effectively understand where and how your customers spend their screen time, you'll need to get a detailed grasp of them across all your channels. That’s where understanding how to implement a cross-channel lead generation strategy comes in handy.
Target the Right Channels & Customers
The way you set up your cross-channel lead generation strategy depends on your customer profiles. To be more precise, your personas decide which target groups and which platforms receive which messages. This is because your target customers will differ across all channels.
A thorough understanding of what your target audience wants, their purchasing patterns, and what and who they are already interacting with may be used to examine comprehensive customer profiles. You can also consider a few more inputs, as shown below, for a better overall picture:
Segments within your audience can be identified by combining aggregate and person-level consumer data to find patterns and commonalities amongst groups. These can then be applied to inform messaging and future tactics, resulting in recurring successful outcomes.
Set Up Specific Goals
Think about whether you’re trying to improve engagement with a certain target audience. Do you wish to increase your presence on a particular channel? Do you wish to close leads more quickly? You can use lead scoring as a way to identify who’s best fit to convert quicker. Your objectives and goals will be the cornerstone of your plan.
To get crucial buy-in, it's best to include relevant teams—typically marketing and sales—in your goal-setting process. To ensure you can precisely gauge your outcome, you should also endeavor to make them specific and data-driven.
Unify Data Points
You never want your channels to run on their own. In that case, cross-promoting your channels helps you increase leads and keep clients interested. By showcasing what you can offer to your prospective clients, you generate additional prospects for fresh lead conversions and demonstrate the depth of your offerings.
You'll need a robust customer data platform to simplify all of this data while still being sufficiently detailed for evaluation. This way, you'll better understand each platform's advantages and disadvantages, the impact of your expenditure, and the habits of your most significant demographics as you collect more data. Additionally, you can allocate your money to maximize your return on investment.
Personalize the Journey
While it may require some effort to produce quality content that advances leads through the funnel, visitors who aren't ready to buy may never return to your website if you don't cater to their needs.
Try using tailored CTAs to personalize your content anywhere in between in the buyer's journey to ensure the right action is being taken. You should try to make it as interesting as possible too, like SparkToro:
It is also useful to participate in discussions by using surveys, queries using AI chat bots. This is because users will only get to the conversion stage if they have been nurtured and have started to trust your company.
Testing and Analyzing is Key
You can’t expect to get everything right on the first go. You’ll have to do a few iterations of your strategy to understand what’s working and what isn’t.
Although it's great to have proper analytics tracking, it's not always essential. Tracking is crucial from the landing page of your paid advertisement to the marketing automation or system you are utilizing to gather these leads. Going forward, you should be fine as long as you can quantify the landing page's performance for every single channel.
Your team can also concentrate on high-potential prospects by prioritizing leads according to their likelihood of converting using lead score automation.
Once you have followed through every one of the steps, follow them again to enhance the effectiveness of your cross-channel lead generation approach. Go back to them repeatedly to see everything you can identify and adjust to produce even better outcomes.
Mastering Your Cross-Channel Lead Generation Approach
Businesses can increase the likelihood of success and meet their lead generation objectives by combining PPC advertising, email marketing, social media marketing, and content marketing.
But to continuously improve your strategy and get better results, you must be strategic and data-driven in your approach to cross-channel lead generation.
With its comprehensive and integrated approach to lead generation, a cross-channel strategy may be an effective tool for businesses seeking to expand and thrive. You only need to understand what your potential customers need, and how you can provide them with that in their buyer journey.
