How combining data from your online and offline media channels can achieve the results you need for your next multi channel marketing campaign.
What is Multi-Channel Marketing?
Multi channel marketing refers to marketing campaigns that aim to engage consumers and cater to their interests using both online and offline media channels. While it’s easier to track online engagement, sadly offline media channels are often pushed aside when marketers analyze a campaign’s effectiveness. When it comes to offline marketing activities, such as OOH, TV, and print, companies can no longer rely on guesswork. Collecting data from offline channels is just as vital if you want to deliver a campaign with impact.
The key to an effective multi channel marketing strategy is to use the data that’s at your fingertips to ensure all channels are optimized. Here’s how to do it!
Leveraging Marketing Analytics to Enhance Multi-Channel Campaigns
There’s a wealth of analytics and data platforms out there, but be wary of having one tool for each of your channels, there’s too many channels these days to waste time on siloed data. While this approach can help you understand exactly how to optimize just one channel, it’s not properly optimized if siloed data stops you from receiving higher-level insights and that form strategic decision making.
Choosing a media planning and marketing tool that gives you an overview of all your data from all of your marketing channels can save you hours and money on crunching the numbers yourself. Check a tool has the integrations you need to automatically pull your data from your various channels—such as social media and online display ads—and what functionalities it has for manually importing data from offline sources.
Better yet, let Mediatool do the number crunching for you. By integrating your online channels in line with offline data you can gain visibility over your multi channel campaigns.
It’s also worth carefully reviewing the user interface and the ways a tool can display your data. Remember that being able to view granular details is essential for optimizing individual channels, but it’s in combining your data from all your sources that you’ll gain the insights you need to help your campaigns really come together. Check that you can track the impact of your online and offline media channels, in order to assess how they influence one another continuously.
Gathering the Right Data From Your Multi-Channel Marketing Campaigns
To create campaigns that cover all touchpoints and all markets, you need to figure out what performs best on which marketing channels. This is where tracking and analyzing online and offline channels comes in.
Tracking data is relatively straightforward for online activities. For instance, click-through rates (CTRs), engagement metrics, and cost per acquisition (CPA) can be tracked to help understand which assets are performing well (and which aren’t). These metrics can help gauge your KPIs, goals, and budget, and compare your plans against actual performance.
Tracking offline engagements used to be more challenging, but now there are ways to do it whilst combining the data from your online channels. First, collect data from the sources—such as reach and ratings points from TV, regional engagement from OOH, and print media subscriptions—and then compare it with your online measurements for a holistic view of your marketing impact.
By collecting information on your separate channels and combining your data, you can begin to build up an overall picture of how your campaign will function. Then, you can glean insights from your data to make better-informed decisions that help you reach your goals.
But gathering data is only the first step. Running effective multi channel marketing campaigns also involves crunching the numbers (and knowing which marketing tools can help you with this).
When Multi-Channel Marketing Campaigns Come Together: Heineken and Publicis’s “Cheers to All”
When an advertising campaign comes together is one of the most rewarding moments in marketing. It’s easy to see why consumers rated Heineken’s ‘Cheers to all’ as the most creative and effective ad of 2020 at the Kantar awards. In the ad, Heineken addresses gender-related drinks stereotypes in a light-hearted way, rather than being overly preachy or self-righteous, and viewers loved it for that.
The advertising agency, Publicis, expertly combined global, national, local, and online channels to ensure the campaign performed exactly as intended. The campaign centered on a TV commercial that was broadcast in 15, 30, 45, and 48-second versions across multiple countries, and it was supported by digital and social assets. The campaign was further supported by local marketing activities, including locally-created OOH.
What made the campaign such a success—alongside its excellent handling of a delicate contemporary issue—is that it was strategically coordinated at the global level with highly targeted advertising at the regional level that was complemented by interactions via online social channels. The YouTube ad racked up nearly half a million views across Heineken’s various regional channels, and the ad was shared multiple times on Facebook via various global and national pages.
Use an All-in-one Tool to Combine Your Multi-Channel Marketing Data to Get the Results you Need
Tracking, measuring, and combining your online and offline media data is the key to effective multi channel marketing and driving even more potential customers to act. One of the best ways to do this is by using an all-in-one media planning and marketing platform like Mediatool. All your marketing data is collected and stored in one convenient place so you view the granular details of each of your channels, while keeping tabs on your overall performance so you meet your KPIs, reach your goals, and stay within budget.
As well as brands, Mediatool is specifically designed for agencies so you can easily toggle between campaigns for your various clients to handle all your campaign data and activities in one convenient place.
