Retargeter

How to Use Cross-Channel Marketing to Drive Conversions: Part 1

One of the most common pitfalls in marketing is working alone.  Especially in start-ups, marketing managers are often so strapped for time when launching their campaigns, they forget that a little collaboration goes a long way.  Working cross-functionally to promote individual campaign through other marketing channels keeps your brand’s messaging consistent and increases your return on investment (ROI).  In this post, I’ll cover just a few ways of how you can use cross-channel marketing to drive conversions.

To start, identify your top budget line items and focus on what other marketing channels can help increase your ROI for those campaigns. Since you’re spending so much on your primary marketing campaigns, you’ll want to ensure you get the most out of your budget by increasing your reach.  Here are a few common top line items that might be relevant to your business, and some tips on using cross-channel marketing to drive conversions:

TV Advertising

If you’re running television ads, it can be a bit challenging to measure effectiveness and ROI.  To improve conversions, use a performance marketing approach, and incorporate online marketing with your TV ads by promoting unique vanity domains within your TV spots.

• Web Analytics: When using vanity domains, you can leverage your web analytics package to measure the inbound traffic to these sites.  Simply add the javascript code provided to start analyzing interesting metrics like the time of day your visitor came, how long they stayed for, whether they converted, and how much volume you’re seeing at the time a commercial airs.
• Paid Search Advertising: Someone who views your ad, but searches for the vanity domain later rather than typing in the domain directly into their browser could ruin your TV ad strategy if you’re not ranked #1 in the organic search results. This is why paid search advertising works well with these types of TV ads and can also provide you with additional data on the performance of your TV ads.
• Social Media Marketing: To effectively use social media, post engaging and visual content.  With TV ads, you’ve already invested significant ad spend in developing commercials, so why not syndicate it even further to your social media fans?  When someone likes or shares your video, their friends will see it as well, giving your ad even more reach.

PPC Advertising

With the widespread growth in Internet usage, many advertisers have now adopted pay-per-click advertising, making the auctions more competitive, and very expensive. Driving conversions from your PPC advertising can be improved with these marketing channels:

• Retargeting: If you’re investing a significant portion of your budget in paid search advertising and receiving a 2% conversion rate from your campaigns, wouldn’t you want to reach those visitors who didn’t convert?  With retargeting, you can. Retargeting typically runs on a CPM pricing model, and requires you to reach to your designer chops for some sexy banner ads.
• Web Analytics: You would think that online advertising and online analytics are one and the same, but at larger companies, this is not always the case.  PPC advertisers must make sure they’re leveraging their web analytics package to measure the performance of keywords and placements, and optimize the budget accordingly.
• Search Engine Optimization: With your insights into the top converting placements and keywords from your analytics tools, embrace this knowledge with your SEO manager to improve your organic rank.  You can build links on placements that are sending high-converting traffic and incorporate your top converting keywords into your website’s copy to improve organic rank for these queries.

Stay tuned for part 2 of this series where I’ll talk about a real-life example of how I used cross-channel marketing in a previous role to generate buzz around my marketing campaigns and experienced an overall growth in leads and conversions.

About the Author

Jana Fung is the Marketing Manager of MixRank. She has managed successful demand generation programs for over 5 years. She is optimistic about the growth of online advertising and has a passion for helping online marketers with their campaigns. If you’re a MixRank fan or just want to say hi, she’s interested in connecting with you! Follow her on Twitter @jana_fung.

About MixRank

MixRank.com is a spy tool for contextual and display ads. With MixRank you can see exactly where your competitors are buying traffic and which ad copy is performing best for them across over 100,000 sites. You can use MixRank to watch your competitors spend money testing different ads and traffic sources, see which ones worked best, and use that data to build your own campaign.