What if there was a way to achieve all these requirements? Would that not be an amazing feat?

Well, it does exist and you have heard about it too. With over 10 major marketing channels for any given brand, from any industry, the solution to connect across them all is cross-channel marketing.

Since customers have the liberty to choose any of these mediums to engage, interact, and shop from your brand, a consistent experience becomes an important baseline. 

Cross-channel marketing, for the uninitiated, is a marketing technique where the focus is on providing a consistent and integrated experience to consumers. And that’s across all organic, paid, owned, traditional, and digital media channels. 

It is common to confuse this with multichannel marketing wherein a brand aims to establish its presence across all major marketing channels. In multichannel marketing, the buck stops with creating content on all platforms. And these channels will not be communicating with each other.

But for cross-channel, the case is different. You must go that extra mile and include consistency, integration, and a seamless experience into that content. In simple words, cross-channel marketing is an upgrade over multichannel marketing. 

So what does the world of cross channel marketing have in store for you in 2022? And how can you prepare for success in it? 

All that and more in this blog by Kimp awaits you. So, let’s get right into it.

The State of Cross-Channel Marketing in 2022 

Establishing your brand’s presence across multiple channels is the mandatory prerequisite to implementing your cross channel marketing campaigns.

Cross Channel marketing holds the potential of delivering a seamless experience to customers and completely removing friction from the buying process. In a fiercely competitive world as we experience currently, this is very important for achieving our business goals. 

When someone checks your app, your Instagram profile, your store, and your website (and believe us, they will!), they expect a similar interface/color scheme, and experience. 

So when you go about planning your Instagram aesthetics, app interface, landing pages, in-store displays, and web stores, you must keep this fact in mind. In fact, a study tells us that 72% of customers worldwide expect brands to offer them a consistent, multichannel, and seamless experience online and offline.

Most customers take less than 5 seconds to drop out from a transaction and UI/UX accounts for a majority of those drops. 

Brands with cross-channel engagement have 89% of customers returning to the brand. But beyond customer experience, cross-channel marketing is good for your business’ bottom line too. In the case of B2C marketing, multichannel campaigns can yield up to 24 percent higher ROI. 

But all good things come with a challenge. Right? Otherwise, where is the fun in scaling the peaks? 

So what are the challenges specifically in the world of cross channel marketing? Let’s take a look.

Challenges in Cross-Channel Marketing 

As we said, good things usually give you challenges. And that is why not every brand out there is actively working in cross channel marketing. But when you know this is the way forward and this is what customers expect from you, there is no time to let a few obstacles hold you back.

So what exactly are the challenges in executing a cross channel marketing strategy?

• First off, impact analysis becomes a major consideration when you have a cross-channel marketing strategy in place. If every channel has a selling proposition, then you can track where the most sales are coming from. But in most cases, it is not that easy. An email can lead to an app download and subsequent purchase. Such instances become harder to track but you can of course get some more insight with a survey, attribution model, or a customer feedback form.
• Secondly, designing for a cross channel marketing strategy is challenging. When you need your content to fit the specifics for more than 3-4 channels, that requires a lot of time, resources, and out-of-box thinking. Each channel has its own design style, not to mention the variance in the receiving audience. Hence, the creatives you need and the revisions they undergo increase exponentially. 
• Lastly, ensuring consistency across all channels is a struggle for brands of all sizes. When there are too many balls in the air, drops become a part of life. But these drops in customer experiences can prove to be expensive. And that is a major issue in the current market.

Kimp can help you keep up with increased design requirements and maintain visual consistency. Our unlimited design service includes unlimited designs and revisions, across a multitude of design categories. Book a call with the team today to know more! 

Channels in Cross-Channel Marketing 

Studies tell us that using more channels is the way to your customer’s heart and purse strings. Yes, 62% of participants in a study showed us that engaging with a brand across 10 or more channels led to them making at least one purchase a week. 

While this scenario won’t play out exactly the same for every brand, it is definitely a good indication of the impact of cross channel marketing.

Now we know 10 or more sounds like a lofty goal. But like all things, the aim is to start small and then slowly build your presence across more marketing channels.

Next comes the discussion on which channels to focus on. Ultimately, this decision rests on three major factors: 

• Your industry’s previous record in each marketing channel
• Your target audience 
• The nature of your best-performing content

Work with your team to pull out the data and identify the best marketing channels for your brand. 

However, if you are looking for a broader understanding, then we turn to an older report from Mediapost on channels that work well together. It shows compatibility between the channels that are ideal for cross-channel marketing campaigns. 

• Computer/Mobile
• TV/Mobile
• Computer/TV
• Radio/Mobile
• Computer/Radio

In the modern context of digital marketing, this tells us that digital marketing channels such as SEO, PPC, Social media, and more pair well with video ads. And audio content such as radio and podcasts are a good ally to have when you have active digital marketing channels. 

Mobile compatibility for all your marketing campaigns is also a necessary element in cross channel marketing. 

Many follow the RACE framework to formulate, execute, and track their cross channel marketing campaigns. A brief schematic of that is below for your quick reference. 

5 Design Tips to Ace Cross-Channel marketing in 2022

Design is a major challenge for brands looking to develop cross channel marketing in 2022. As the space becomes crowded and more brands invest in a post-pandemic marketing world, you need something special to help you stand out. And we have time and again seen that design is that special something in this visually-oriented world. 

But what if we can turn design into your advantage instead of a challenge? Will that not make 2022 your favorite year yet? 

We think so and that is why the Kimp team is here with our specially curated top design tips to ace cross-channel marketing in 2022. 

Excited? 

We are too, so no more waiting. Let’s jump right in.

1) Develop a Brand Style Guide 

We discussed how consistency is one of customers’ major requisites in the current market. They expect a seamless experience which also includes consistency in brand voice, visual identity, and content design style. 

While the ideal scenario is that this happens organically without a hiccup, the reality is far from it. Brands usually have 2-3 teams spread across marketing channels, hence the opportunity to drop balls goes up by a lot. To avoid this, we recommend every brand to have a brand style guide that details:

• The brand colors to use across different marketing channels
• The brand fonts to use across different marketing channels 
• Placement, sizing, and style of branding elements across different mediums such as video ads, print media, and digital media 
• Notes on brand voice, tone, and content style
• Imagery/custom illustration that the team can use for various channels

Any changes you make to your marketing and branding campaigns must automatically register here so that there is no scope for inconsistencies. 

With this document in hand, you can ensure that whether a customer interacts with you on email, app, website, or a third-party promotional site, they see the same face. And that can help you immensely in cross channel marketing. 

Wondering how the brand style guide for popular brands look like? Check out Kimp’s guides here and here.

2) Customize Design for your Target Audience 

Cross channel marketing includes at least 5-10 marketing channels. This spans digital, print, and various social media platforms. Even if you have your relevant audience on all these platforms, the audience on each of these will vary to some extent. So, serving the exact same design style and content unchanged across all these platforms will be a huge miss in your marketing campaigns.

This is why we recommend brands develop their ideal buyer persona for the brand as a whole and also for each of these marketing channels. With these buyer personas, you can tweak the designs in a way to appeal to them specifically. 

Remember the tweaks must be on the smaller and aesthetic elements without compromising the majority of design for consistency. 

For example, your target audience on Facebook may be different than that on LinkedIn. So you can use videos on Facebook while you use the same content as slides or infographics on LinkedIn for best results. 

Kimp Tip: Some specific color schemes, font styles, and imagery finds appeal in customers of every generation, demographic, and geographic location. So it helps to customize these for each platform so that you get your audience’s attention easily. 

Need help experimenting with design tweaks for each platform? Sign up for a Kimp Graphics design subscription and do it all for a flat monthly fee. 

3) Understand the Buyers’ Journey 

When we speak of cross channel-marketing campaigns, one of the biggest hurdles brands and marketers face is reaching customers during specific stages of the buyers’ journey.

In our blog on designing for each stage of the buyers’ journey, we detail how each design piece works for specific needs customers have. In cross-channel marketing, marketers create content and campaigns for multiple platforms at once. Instead of reposting all of them across all platforms, these campaigns must trace the typical buyers’ journey. 

This comes by understanding your ideal customers’ typical journey. If your data tells us you that customers visit your website more during the awareness stage and then move on to social media, this is how your design must work too.

Create awareness stage content on your blogs, web stores, and website while the detailed content for consideration stage goes on social media. This way you avoid overloading the channels and keep it specific to what customers need out of them.

Kimp Tip: Chart out your buyers’ journey and the corresponding channels before you commence designing campaigns. You can optimize your resources, budget, and efforts with this method. 

4) Branding Consistency 

We have been stressing this for a long time but it definitely deserves a separate section. So, here goes. Consistent and seamless experience is non-negotiable to customers. They cannot remember everything about every ad and brand they encounter daily. And if you make it harder by changing design styles frequently, you are most definitely out of the running. 

Branding consistency has three major components:

• Visual branding such as logo, brand colors, typography, photography style, trademarks, if any
• Content style markers such as specific phrases, taglines, tone, and brand voice 

Some of the channels you use for your cross-channel marketing may not have a visual component and some may not have a content component. That is why we recommend focusing on both aspects as it helps immensely in the longer run. 

These markers you use in visual and textual communication must eventually lead to enhanced brand awareness with higher brand recall value in the market. Hence, choose your visual design elements with care since they will represent your brand. 

Read our blog on building a visual identity for your brand here. 

5) Solicit Engagement 

When we outlined the challenges of cross channel-marketing, we spoke of how brands struggle to record the channel that is resulting in the most revenue. While there are many ways to counter this, we have a content marketing strategy for you that can help. 

Passive content marketing is so passe. Every channel is all about engagement and there is no shame in asking for it. Customers read hundreds of content pieces in a day, skimming most of them. So unless there is an explicit call for engagement or a drive to make it happen, they will not always engage with your content. 

Creating content that actively brings in engagement and clicks for your brand to track can be very helpful. 

So what can you create? The possibilities are endless, but here are a few of our suggestions: 

• Videos in all channels right from email to social media and SEO too have some of the highest click rates. YouTube links to Google Shopping, and most brands have seen a tremendous increase in CTR via this.
• Gamified content invites customers to immerse themselves in the content you have for them and can help you track engagement rates across channels.
• Infographics with embedded links on newsletters and blogs to visualize data and generate clicks. 
• Channel-specific landing pages consistent with the channels’ visual designs but designed to track the source of the click.

Ace Cross channel marketing with Kimp in 2022

We hope we have impressed upon you the value of design in cross-channel marketing! It truly holds the potential to change the face of your marketing campaigns. And we expect 2022 to be more about visual marketing than it is even currently. 

So it becomes even more important for brands to have a design team that can handle anything the new year brings with it. And that’s where Kimp comes in. Our Kimp Graphics and Kimp Video design subscriptions give you the chance to work with a dedicated design team. And they allow you to make unlimited design requests and get unimited revisions, across a ton of different design categories.

Make 2022 the year you go bigger and better with our marketing and designs.

Sign up for the free trial to see how it all works.