Why Is It Vital to Use Cross-Channel Marketing on Amazon?

The Internet shouts at every corner of different cross-channel marketing opportunities you have as an Amazon seller. But what does it really mean for your business, and what’s involved in acquiring customers across many channels? And once you’ve got them, how do you keep them coming back?

After you read this article, these questions won’t be bothering you anymore. We’ve got answers to them. What’s more, we have a step-by-step plan on how you should proceed with each channel.

So, let’s go!

Table of content:

• What is Cross-Channel Marketing?
• Why is it Vital to Use Cross-Channel Marketing?
• Planning a Successful Cross-Channel Campaign
• Convey Your Idea Across Multiple Channels
• Major Challenges of Cross-Channel Marketing
• Final Word

What is Cross-Channel Marketing?

With every passing day in the digital age, the daunting task of staying on track with marketing novelties has become increasingly difficult. Gone are the days when you could count on emails only to reach your target audience. In turn, marketers in big brands are always trying to get a leg up on their competitors by reaching their audience across multiple channels, creating a personalized experience for each individual. But what does this mean for small- and medium-sized businesses that are just starting their journey into content marketing?

Huge brand-name companies are well into the process of delivering their marketing messages over as many channels as possible. They’re using in-house creatives, agency creative hubs, and marketing automation technology to reach their audiences on the channels their prospects are most likely to turn to. Many Amazon sellers are moving towards the same path.

Although only a small percentage of Amazon sellers are using cross-channel marketing techniques, they generate a disproportionately high order value. Cross-channel marketing conjures up images of a complex marketing plan that spans many touchpoints and media types. But in the simplest terms, it’s using the same marketing principles across all of these channels. Together, they seamlessly complement one another.

In short, a cross-channel strategy does the following:

• It spans the traditional boundaries of marketing and advertising;
• It allows you to reach current and prospective clients in a more elevated way;
• It shortens the customer’s journey and helps them find the necessary product much faster.

Why is it Vital to Use Cross-Channel Marketing? 

Here’s the thing about content marketing: it’s vital to a growth strategy. From lead generation to brand awareness to conversions, it all starts with putting your content in front of new eyes. But, again, for that to happen, it needs to be distributed across multiple channels and across a range of platforms. 

According to the 2020 Omnichannel Statistics Report, when compared to one-channel campaigns, the purchase rate for ad campaigns transmitted across multiple channels is 287 percent higher.

source: Omnisend

Business Insider says that 47% of consumers who interact with sellers via ten or more channels make purchases from that seller at least once a week, compared with 21% of shoppers who interact with one to four channels.

Cross-channel marketing is often called the holy grail of marketing because it increases sales and brand awareness. Most marketing decisions are taken once, but in reality, marketing is an ongoing process. Sellers need to get creative—they need not just one but multiple channels of communication.

If you’re still not convinced that cross channel advertising is great, we’ve got several of its benefits for you to note:

• When you focus on cross-channel marketing, it’s easier to reach and cultivate leads across multinational markets. Your potential client might be using Facebook over Instagram and vice versa. That’s why you need to take advantage of as many social media as possible.
• Because digital marketing is about providing the right content at the right time to the right person, with the right channel – with a multichannel approach, you have more chances of achieving all those goals.
• Whether it’s working on a Facebook page, having a Twitter account, or tweeting regularly on Periscope, social media has made it easier for businesses of all shapes and sizes to interact with their customers or even with their competitors’ audiences. And that is a game-changer for those who struggle to keep up with or even outperform the competition.

According to Gartner’s survey (see graph below), most companies use cross-channel ads to boost brand awareness.

source: Capterra

Another compelling argument why using multiple channels for your advertising campaign is so significant is that digital marketing has enabled customers to make more proactive and constructive purchasing decisions. Many shoppers are consulting multiple channels prior to making the final purchasing decision.

To sum up, here are the main reasons to employ a cross-channel ad strategy:

• To keep up with the industry trends: as the marketing landscape changes and evolves, the ability to reach new audiences on different channels becomes increasingly important.
• To boost business efficiency: sending your message to the world via multiple channels of communication pushes lead generation, brand awareness, and cost-efficiency. 
• To increase your reach: you can use cross-channel marketing and acquisition to help maximize your return on investment (ROI) by optimizing your marketing efforts and building your customer base through social media.
• Keep up with the competition: online marketing is booming, there is a lot of competition out there, and nothing will get your company ahead of your competitors, like mastering the art of cross-channel marketing.

Profit Whales Case Study

Find out how we achieved lower ACoS (29,82%) than break-even ACoS for our client

 

 

 

 

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Planning a Successful Cross-Channel Campaign

The internet has made it increasingly easy to source the best products at the lowest price. While these deals have undoubtedly been a boon to the customer, it has also been a burden to the seller because of the many different channels they need to operate in order to spot as many future clients as possible. 

This procedure is now much easier with recent Amazon updates. In early 2021, Amazon sounded that sellers who drive external traffic to Amazon would be rewarded. Another useful release was the novel linking system – Amazon Attribution. Just like UTMs on Google, it allows for monitoring of all traffic that sellers bring from external sources.

Profit Whales have begun developing new strategies that take into account these updates. Because Amazon’s own tool has been created to help track every unique user’s purchase and click, this cued us to think that creating a connection between all of the channels and exchanging data and analytics that they provide can be the perfect formula to creating the greatest ad campaign.

Profit Whales ZTH Structure

The primary mission of the ZTH framework designed by Profit Whales is to track and comprehend each keyword, its placement, under what conditions it is displayed, and why some placements perform well, and others do not. That is, it delivers full control over the semantics and the capability to boost a considerable number of groups of keywords (which Amazon does not provide). We scaled our logic further, recreating it in Google and other channels where it’s possible.

Amazon DSP

The Profit Whales team chose to try this idea on Google, as the semantics was ready-to-use. When we launched it on Google, we had the ability to run social media targeting. But there was a problem: targeting must be adjusted to the audience and its interests. Therefore, more information was needed.

Amazon Demand Side Platform granted us an opportunity to run our advertising campaigns on Amazon’s partner websites, i.e. sites where Amazon ads are permitted. There are millions of various websites out there to help you fine-tune your audience. It is only left for you to go to the DSP dashboard and launch a few remarketing campaigns. In several months, the data you’ll retrieve from them will be the fullest and the most detailed.

Note: Amazon DSP is a proprietary feature. You can request your own ad account if your budget is over 1k per year. Another way is to cooperate with agencies like Profit Whales. We launch a DSP for merchants with any budget.

This is the logic behind how you should share analytics and data. This is important for every seller since it is one thing to run ads on different sites and quite another to understand how they work and intersect.

Seller Websites

Most Amazon sellers have their own websites (Shopify, WordPress, etc.) where they can find order data, audience information, and other important analytics. This is particularly valid for Shopify websites that generate clear info about the buyer: location, age, email address, etc.

The basic goal of running multi-channel advertising campaigns is to find the lowest cost per acquisition, that is, the platform where it is more affordable to get a client. Employing various sales channels, sellers have the opportunity to test their traffic by pushing it to their website or Amazon store, thus figuring out which channel is most efficient. 

Running A/B tests where one ad directs shoppers to the website and another – to Amazon will help study the customer behavior differences and identify the best ways of interacting with them.

Profit Whales Cross-Channel Objectives 

For the Profit Whales team, the core of the cross-channel marketing roadmap is to analyze the marketing history of our clients, accumulate vital data, and find the appropriate cross-marketing strategy that will match the client’s goal. Generally, this path begins with Amazon, the most commonly used trading platform. Additionally, its DSP tool can be configured to generate useful information. To get even more insights, we can set up PPC advertising and then use it on Google and other sites.

With content marketing and understanding the purpose and effectiveness of advertising, our team has the opportunity to understand what can be done in order to improve the client’s online marketing efforts. When businesses discuss cross-channel marketing plans, there are numerous benefits that most businesses have yet to explore. One of these benefits is the opportunity to boost organic traffic and sell more. There are more tools now to meet all the goals and complete all the tasks.

Convey Your Idea Across Multiple Channels

When planning to market a product’s launch campaign, marketers know that they need to think both inward and outward of their product brand’s current realm of influence. Only this way companies are able to leverage their extensive product awareness and reputation as a brand in order to create cross-channel campaigns that drive customers to purchase the products of their competitors. 

Keep in mind that your social media content must align with your brand voice and presentation. Otherwise, the external perceptions of your brand will be changing with each different message. If you intend to stay on the market for a while, you better work on your brand messaging because the customer needs not only to be convinced to tune in but also to have a distinct image of your company.

What channels exactly should you be using? The more the better, but if you don’t have the budget, it’s better to make the most of two-three channels. YouTube might be the current social platform to rule the roost. Google and Facebook’s combined audience no longer dwarfs Twitter – they have different audiences which you should learn and know how to target.

The amount of channels you want to use depends on your goals. We know that cross-channel marketing can be costly and challenging. But with a clear plan and clever tactics, you can make it work.

Important note: Be sure to build a great audience before you start a marketing campaign. Many marketers are starting marketing campaigns in a vacuum and getting disappointed when they don’t have traction in social media, email, and other channels. Take the time to build a great audience in the same channels before you start the marketing efforts. The better the audience you’ve built, the better the chances that you’ll get great traction from your marketing campaign.

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to content marketing. In fact, you need to decide how and when to use each type of content: what’s the best type of content for your customers and for your overall brand. Then, you need to carefully consider what channels you’re using and how to best convey your idea to those channels.

Major Challenges of Cross-Channel Marketing

It seems like a no-brainer that in order to remain competitive and relevant today, businesses must be fully engaged in the marketing game — but this isn’t always an easy feat. Often cross-channel marketing is more difficult than expected, requiring brand-defining campaigns and campaigns that are intensively focused on acquiring new customers.

How does one piece of content help you cut through a variety of channels to talk about your product to 15 key audiences? This is a challenging question that content marketers must be able to address accurately. Let’s explore other problems you may encounter with cross-marketing:

• Cross-Channel Consistency: Another challenge for businesses is achieving consistency for their brand message across multiple channels. The challenge of staying aligned with your brand in today’s cross-channel world has never been more complex and dire. Advertisers and marketing managers must always monitor the data integrity, branding, and consistency of the ad campaigns that they are running.
• A/B Tests and Results Tracking: Businesses’ customers vary in their needs and relationship with the company, especially within various channels. How is it possible to build an audience across your various platforms while also maximizing ROI through content marketing? Predictions, experiments, countless tests of diverse content, landing pages and media sources, measuring outcomes – all this is a must-have if you desire to discover an advertising recipe that works sufficiently through channels. 
• Ad Spend Monitoring: To generate a viable marketing plan, an advertiser needs to identify the ROAS of each channel. Riding on the marketer’s goals, a click can mean a lead, a sale, webinar signup, a newsletter subscription, etc. To reap the most value, the sellers need to come up with a unified, balanced campaign across multiple platforms to produce a well-coordinated flow.

You need to properly tag and separate campaigns into individual streams of content and track the performance of all campaigns regularly.

Final Word

Hey, thanks for taking the time to read this! Is your marketing team planning to use cross-channel marketing? Profit Whales has got you covered: get the inbox-clearing guide that tells you everything you need to know before you can start marketing across various platforms.

With us, you’ll reach your goals in no time!