Omnichannel strategy? Call marketing works across venues

all marketing works across venues

Digital marketing has made enormous gains in helping businesses reach wider audiences.

But that doesn’t mean digital is the end-all be-all in finding every potential customer of every demographic. After all, many customers remain offline, some don’t bother to read email and others use ad blockers that keep advertising from appearing on their desktops.

That’s where an omnichannel marketing strategy — one that works to offer specially designed messaging across multiple venues — can fill in the gaps.

Such all-encompassing strategies tend to work very effectively with call marketing campaigns, since they can make excellent use of eye-catching ads featuring your phone number — at optimal times — appearing across TV, radio, desktop, mobile, social media, email, text and/or print. Further, the phone remains a highly important tool for capturing sales revenues; BIA Kelsey estimates digital marketing drove more than 100 billion calls to U.S. businesses last year and forecasts a 62 percent increase in such calls through 2019.

A few tips for incorporating your call marketing strategy into omnichannel marketing:

  • Create four to six personas that help define the demographics, characteristics, buying habits and preferences of your key customers. Then create “journey maps” that help you understand which channels those personas use in their daily lives, for what purposes, during what hours of the day and with what frequency. Consider their challenges, pain points and rewards when conducting business or making purchases.
  • Use that information to form a plan as to which channels are most likely to reach those target customers for the purpose of driving calls to your company.
  • Optimize cross-channel marketing by understanding how various channels work together. A recent Facebook IQ study, for example, found mobile search clicks increased 6.3 percent after Facebook ad exposure. “Make marketing do more by using channels in tandem,” advises Blair Symes in Chiefmarketer.com. “Use social and display ads to fuel more branded searches. Use email addresses from content marketing to better target consumers across digital channels.”
  • Use appropriate tools to organize your campaign. Call attribution tools can track the sources of your incoming calls, data management platforms can integrate all your online, offline and mobile data and analytics tools can help you measure conversions and evaluate other data.
  • Stay on top of emerging new devices that might be included in your campaign. After all, some 50 billion internet-connected devices are forecast by 2020. “Marketers must understand how to use these technologies to our advantage and actively engage with consumers,” writes Symes. “Omnichannel marketing requires marketers to be present with consistent and personalized messaging at every point in the path to purchase, and innovations like beacons, wearables and mobile payments are the new tools in your marketing toolbox.”

Capturing customers across multiple channels can add complexity to your marketing strategy, but can go a long way toward leaving no stone unturned when it comes to finding your best customers.

“How much more effective would your people be if they didn’t have to worry about losing a customer to another channel?” ask the authors of a recent McKinsey report on omnichannel capabilities. “Becoming truly omnichannel is demanding for an organization, but the answers it provides to questions such as these make it worth the investment for organizations willing to make the commitment.”

Ask Dial800 how call marketing using highly memorable phone numbers can boost revenues across multiple channels.

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