Creating a multichannel strategy for your ecommerce website

Your potential customers are using every platform available to them across the internet. They’re socialising, catching up on the latest news and even purchasing from social media channels. 

In the mornings, they check their Instagram feed for the latest happenings, listen to podcasts on walks or while commuting, update their LinkedIn profiles and check networking messages at work, and that’s just the start of the day. There are so many touch points throughout the day where your business could be reaching out and being seen.

From chatting with friends on Facebook messenger to reading new articles and catching sight of billboards on their lunch break, there’s a world of opportunity for your ecommerce brand to be noticed.

Essentially, your business needs a strong multichannel marketing strategy in order to stand out in the ecommerce world.

Simply put, multichannel marketing means running marketing campaigns across multiple channels or platforms, allowing you to reach out to more potential customers and build your brand’s online and offline presence.

Campaigns such as social media posts and adverts across multiple channels, email marketing and search engine advertising are all great strategies for online marketing. In contrast, billboard adverts, newspaper articles and branded packaging are strong offline strategies.

Over 90% of retail brands are present on at least two social media platforms, and for good reason. Here are just a few reasons why ecommerce businesses should have multichannel marketing in place:

Increased brand awareness

When potential customers see branded campaigns several times, they begin to remember the brand name or logo. Even if these campaigns don’t lead to an immediate sale, they’ll recall the brand when landing on a page where several products are listed, for instance, Google shopping results. They will naturally favour a brand they feel more familiar with.

Boosted brand loyalty

Your relationship with your customers doesn’t end once they’ve made their purchase. Indeed that’s only the beginning in reality. Encouraging repeat buyers is so much easier than converting a brand new customer. One of the best ways to increase the likelihood of repeat purchases is by displaying your branded campaigns across multiple channels. This reassures customers that they’ve made the right choice and keeps you in the forefront of their minds when looking for similar products again.

Reach more customers

If you only display your products on one channel, for example, Amazon, you are only reaching one type of audience actively searching for one specific product. You can reach more customers and speed up the customer journey to purchasing by showing up in the right place at the right time. For example, if you were to run ads in news articles or blog posts regarding Christmas gift guides during the festive season and present your products as gift ideas, you’ll be reaching customers who are looking for something to catch their eye rather than a specific product.

Get ahead of competitors 

Multichannel marketing is the perfect way to reach untapped customers and opportunities and, of course, get ahead of your competitors. Research what your competitors are doing, their ad campaigns and where they’re placed, how and where they’re showing up and expand your own strategy beyond this, preferably into channels where the competition isn’t so fierce. By utilising a multichannel marketing strategy, you’ll soon see an increase in sales.

While lots of brands are using multichannel marketing, many aren’t actually getting the most from it. The temptation is just to throw content at every platform and hope it lands in front of a ready-to-buy customer. In reality, that’s wasted time and money and is unlikely to get you the results you’re hoping for. Instead, you should:

Master one channel at a time

Choose one platform and work on it until you’ve totally mastered it. Begin with a channel where there are active rivals. You’ll likely have a good idea of the platform best suited to you and your ecommerce business based on your audience and the channels they use most.

If you’re not sure about the best platform for you, there are several tools available online which allow you to perform competitor analysis easily:

• SEMrush – good for analysing competitor SEO effectiveness
• SimilarWeb – good for website analysis
• TikTok creative library – Good for identifying competitor ads on the platform
• Facebook Ad Library  – Good for finding ads running by competitors

Find where your competition is performing best and focus your efforts on that channel. Don’t be disheartened if you don’t see overnight results; finding what works and what doesn’t takes time, but once you’ve mastered it, you can move on to the next platform.

Keep branding consistent

Once you start marketing campaigns over multiple channels, you must keep your branding and imagery consistent.

Establish your brand identity, including your logo and brand colours. Make sure they follow through to each channel to distinguish your brand and be recognised by potential customers no matter where they see you.

Have strong brand guidelines in place and ensure everyone involved in your marketing knows them and sticks to them. This should cover all visual and written aspects of campaigns, including fonts, colour pallet brand values, words to use and not and tone of voice. This will ensure your campaigns have a strong brand identity throughout.

In short, definitely not. You don’t need to be present on every channel available to succeed in multichannel channel marketing. Once you’ve mastered the first platform and it’s time to expand to more, there are a few stand-out platforms, depending on your business model and target audience.

Ecommerce website or landing page

If you’ve been selling products on Amazon or social media platforms, for example, up until now, the best next step is to build a website, even a basic one that describes your brand and showcases your best products.

With a good website builder, you’ll be able to optimise this over time and start driving traffic towards it.

Instagram marketing

Instagram is perfect for brands to take advantage of visual content marketing. If using product images, always follow the same format, e.g. the same background, lighting, and post-production filters.

Pinterest marketing

Pinterest is a powerful tool for shoppers to discover new brands and products. Their ability to show up in search results means there’s more chance of your brand being seen if you have pins posted. You can either achieve this organically or via their paid ads.

TikTok marketing

TikTok has taken the world by storm in recent years, presenting amazing new opportunities for brands to be seen by its users. Beware, however; you’ll need to commit to a long-term video content strategy and produce very regular content.

Email marketing

Using targeting email campaigns, you can welcome new customers, win back those who have abandoned their cart, upsell, and so much more. Once you have the emails written, use an automated service to send the emails at certain trigger points, for example, if a customer hasn’t purchased from you but has signed up for a newsletter or discount code.

Once you start multichannel marketing, regularly revisit your goals and alter your strategy accordingly.

Firstly, identify how and when your target audience is using each channel you launch campaigns on and how you can reach them. Then set a strategy for how you’ll target each audience on each platform, and always make sure any content you put out is perfectly in line with your brand identity.

Don’t be afraid to test new campaigns and new channels. Set KPIs for each and take time to study the results, and alter your strategy accordingly.