Your Guide to Multichannel (But Single-Story) Marketing

When it comes to multichannel marketing, the biggest mistake being made today is telling too many stories across different channels. Many marketers have mastered the art of packaging their message in different ways for different platforms, like email blast versus brochure versus social media—or even Facebook versus Instagram versus TikTok. 

The problem is that when people see these different packages, they don’t always instinctively understand that they belong to the same original campaign. In the process of changing a blog into a video clip or a display ad, the campaign concept can get warped or lost in translation.

So how do you make sure you’re telling a singular story through your multichannel marketing?

Here are three tips for mastering the art, no matter which channels you’re on:

  1. Know your audience. Even though you’re on different platforms, your audience is still going to fall into the same few segments they always have. Refer to your customer personas (feel free to contact us to learn about creating these, if you don’t have them mapped out already) and learn where each segment resides, so you’re very aware of who you’re speaking to in each location. That way, when you’re tweaking the message or voice, you’re specifically thinking about what they need to know (instead of getting hung up on format alone). Perhaps more importantly, you’re aware of where else they live and what other versions of the messaging they’re encountering. This will prevent you from delivering too many different versions of messaging to the same people repeatedly, which can make your brand seem unauthentic or confused.
  2. Translate forward and backward. What does this mean? Think about a language translation. If you’re translating English to German, you might come up with an equivalent that makes sense. But sometimes, when you take the German and try to translate the phrase back, you don’t wind up with the original message that you started with in English. In fact, it can be a lot different—and it might not even make any sense! This can happen in marketing, too. When you take a newsletter blurb and transform it into a beautiful graphic for Instagram, you might wind up with a high-performing post. But if someone looked at the image by itself and were asked to write a caption for it, would it sound much like the original blurb? When you test your messaging forward and backward from various platform iterations, you can learn if they all sound like they do, in fact, belong to the same campaign and reflect the same intentions.
  3. Establish your goals in advance. How will you know if your multichannel marketing is successful if you don’t start by defining “success”? We like to look at the overall goal for the campaign and think about how each platform should be contributing toward that goal—then, we give each channel its own set of objectives to reach (such as impressions, views, reshares).

For help reaching your audience in an authentic way, across channels, with a unified voice, look, and message, reach out to Mad 4 Marketing for a consultation. We’d love to hear from you!

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