We’ve come a long way from the belief that the same brand messaging should be present on every channel, but today’s marketers must consider ways to seamlessly and cohesively reach customers wherever they are. In our tech-crazed world, it’s easy to confuse multichannel marketing with multi-platform marketing that fills email inboxes, appears on social media feeds and entangles customers into your brand as they trek through the worldwide web. Although email campaigns, social media outreach and advertisements contribute to the modern customer journey, many customers opt to teach themselves about your brand before forging a relationship.
Wouldn’t it be nice to organically arrive in customer conversations? What if your target audience could access your brand using a recommendation from a trusted member of their network? That’s where word-of-mouth marketing comes in and here are three benefits that word-of-mouth will add to your multichannel marketing strategy.
Customer-Centricity
Multichannel marketing boils down to creating multiple avenues for your customers to access your content. By developing uniquely optimized campaigns across networks, brands become more engaged with customer behaviors. Instead of building a multichannel marketing strategy that tries to predict where your customers will be, word-of-mouth marketing empowers customers to further their natural inclination to share new information. A standard multichannel strategy will follow customers wherever they go, but with a focus on word-of-mouth marketing, your messaging can land in the hands of trustworthy and influential customers.
Insightful Data
Thanks to referral marketing automation, word-of-mouth recommendations have advanced to provide the same kind of information as other digital outreach. With an automated word-of-mouth strategy, your multichannel marketing strategy can incentivize customers, fans, and influencers to refer your brand. Your customers can continue along the path of searching across channels and industries, but shareable, trackable links will transform this behavior into useful insight across the multichannel networks that matter most to your brand.
A Complete Journey
The ads and outreach associated with multichannel marketing are often confined to grabbing a prospect’s interest, but what are successful brands doing to nurture a more sustained relationship? How can companies keep the heart of customers beyond the point of purchase? Word-of-mouth marketing allows brands to follow the buzz that their product or service is creating beyond the point of purchase. To stay ahead of the game, offer your customers various paths to reach your product and an easy-to-understand way to talk about it. What could be more multichannel than that?
Multichannel Marketing Strategy
For companies that are tired of chasing customers (and conversations) from platform to platform, word-of-mouth marketing may be the missing piece to your multichannel marketing strategy. As you work to find innovative solutions, don’t forget about the organic pathway that word-of-mouth marketing provides. Your customers are already talking and now it’s time to join the conversation.