How to Use Multi-channel Marketing to Grow Your Business

The aim of marketing is simple: find customers, keep them, and satisfy their needs. But, of course, each step is an intricate process. It takes a considerable amount of testing to find the most effective lead generation techniques, find ways to win customer loyalty, and discover the best practices for customer service.

Still, it’s a mistake to think of marketing as a single process. In fact, it’s an umbrella term for various processes, like product research, development, advertising, promotions, sales, and customer service. Each process forms a link in an organizational chain. While many companies specialize in either online or offline marketing, the best approach is to use multi-channel marketing, which blends different promotional channels. What makes this method highly effective is that it catches the attention of customers who are both offline and online. Reaching out to customers in various ways not only helps improve lead generation but also helps build your brand as you will be seen all over the place.

So, think of promoting your business or product line through offline channels like giveaways and tradeshows and through online channels via search engine optimization and blogging. Let’s take a closer look at both types of channels for marketing your business.

Offline Marketing Channels

Regarding offline marketing, giveaways and trade shows are two good strategies to initiate your offline marketing campaigns.

Giveaways

Giveaways are promotional merchandise, often referred to as “swag.” You can brand these products with your company’s logo, image, or slogan. You can give giveaways at your store’s location or events like trade shows or business seminars. One example of a popular type of giveaway is Gildan activewear t-shirts. When you contact a Gildan wholesale seller, you can bulk order blank t-shirts at a discounted price. Then you can send them to a screen printer to have your company’s logo, slogan, or whatever else you want to be printed on them.

Tradeshows

Trade shows, also sometimes referred to as “trade fairs,” “trade exhibitions,” or “expos,” are large-scale exhibitions and events where companies from a specific industry showcase or demonstrate their latest innovations, product line, and services.

Trade shows can be either open to the public or be industry-only shows (a collection of key players in an industry who share information on marketing trends).  Often, too, trade shows can be a hybrid. The trade show is only for those within an industry on certain days. Then it can be open to the public for the next few days. The Frankfurt Book Fair, for example, is industry-only for the first three days, then open to the public for the remaining two days. Attending both types of trade shows will help you with your marketing efforts.

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Online Marketing Channels

Two good strategies to initiate your online marketing campaigns are to use SEO and expand your content marketing efforts through blogging.

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) affects how your website will be shown on a search engine’s organic results page. By learning how to boost your SEO ranking through various techniques, you’ll be able to attract free traffic for a long time without any additional effort.

Blogging

One of the best ways to attract visitors to your website and establish your reputation as an authority in your niche is through content marketing and publishing free content for your audience.

Until 2009, blogs were almost always written by individuals, but in 2010, the idea of multi-author blogs (MAB) became popular. MABs invite a variety of authors to contribute to a blog. Depending on the size and scope of your business, you may decide to use an individual author platform or take the multi-author route.

Focus on A Chosen Few

Since there is an inexhaustible number of ways to market your products, you will need to focus on just a few techniques rather than risk wasting your time, money, and talent by trying too many marketing techniques at once.

As you explore the benefits of offline and online multichannel marketing, you’ll want to test out various ways of promoting your products, then double down on what works the best.