Use Multi-Channel Marketing to Spread Your Value and Drive Sales

Your customers and prospects, more than anything else, are searching for answers —solutions to their problems.

Does your company have the answers your target audience is looking for? Do you offer the solutions and services that solve your customers’ and prospects’ problems? The answer is yes, I’m sure. That’s why you’re still in business. But, if you don’t start telling the world about the services and solutions you offer — better yet, telling your customers and prospects — your bottom line may start suffering.

Don’t assume your target audience knows about the services, the solutions, and especially the value you offer. Customers and prospects almost never know what you think they know. Many are still learning about strategies and ideas that would make their businesses stronger and more profitable. Strategies that you can teach them.

In order for your web traffic to support your e-commerce site as well as the rest of your operation, you’ve got to give its visitors more than just products and a shopping cart. You’ve got to give them a reason to come back for more than just a price-check. People may be finding your site because you’re paying Google a fortune to get them to your site to look at products, but if these visitors find nothing extraordinary, interesting or useful except your products and your prices, you’re really just a commodity; and there’s no reason for them to ever return or be loyal to you.

Because your marketing messages are competing with the rest of the world for attention, it’s important that they be shared far and wide. If you have more to offer than just products and low prices, that information needs to be in as many places as possible, as often as possible, to attract more readers to you. Readers who find helpful information will remember your company and revisit the marketing platforms where you publish. The more they see you offering helpful information, the better they’ll trust you and eventually approach you directly for your solutions and services.

Spread Your Messaging Far and Wide with Multi-Channel Marketing

Multi-channel marketing, also known as cross-channel marketing, is like marketing on steroids. It’s how you deliver your marketing collateral so that it reaches prospective and existing customers via industry-appropriate distribution platforms and channels, using the most popular devices and networks, and reaching the widest audience possible.

The key to any successful marketing campaign is, of course, to know your audience. Know what sparks their interest and where they can be found. This includes information such as:

• What social media platforms are your customers most active on?
• What devices do they tend to use?
• What type of content gets the most attention from them?
• What topics are they most interested in?

With this knowledge, your team can target topics, channels, and platforms that will reach the greatest share of your audience. You can’t pick them all, so it’s necessary to find out which are the most popular for your industry, and then spread your content across these channels.

Companies in the Helping Business Will Stand Out from the Crowd

Anyone with a Google account can promote a product, which is why so many distributors end up getting showroomed or are competing on price.

When promoting your content, therefore, remember that people are searching for answers. So, instead of promoting a product, promote the problem it solves. Otherwise, it’s just another product. You cannot assume what your customers already know. You may think they will make the connection from the product to their problem, but in all likelihood, they will not invest the time to do additional research about a specific product when they know they’ll eventually find the solution to their issue by further researching their problem.

Rather than spending money to have Google draw buyers to a product, invest instead in content that illustrates clearly how your product will solve their problems, and how your product is their solution. After all, if the person looking for a solution doesn’t know your product is their answer, why would look deeper at that product?

The companies that consistently share content that is clearly intended to help customers vs. to simply sell products are the companies that will consistently win new customers. These are the companies people remember and revisit online. These are the companies that become a source so trusted that they never worry about price. They have websites that their customers use for research, their voice carries authority, and their style or culture of being in the ‘helping business’ creates loyalty that no other company can compete with.