The digital marketing world is different than it was just a few years ago. If you grew up on SEO keywords and HTML website coding, you’ve seen the industry come a long way. Old Google algorithms give way to new. The world rushes from desktop to laptop, to cloud, to virtualization. Everyone is always embracing the next new big thing.
Here’s one of the biggest new questions that digital marketers wrestle with as they try to help companies come up with comprehensive plans. What about channels? Marketing channels have grown from a tiny seedling into an enormous shrub, and that’s not likely to reverse course any time soon.
Proliferation of Digital Marketing Channels
Today’s businesses have a dizzying diversity of channels.
It’s not just Internet websites and print media anymore. You can still advertise on the front of a restaurant placemat, but you can also peddle your wares on social media and in mobile apps and cloud gateways in any number of digital crevices across the web. Sound exhausting?
The proliferation of marketing channels sets up some important questions for businesses that want to really fine-tune their overall marketing approach. For instance, marketers may ponder: how do you make all of these channels work well together? How do you make them complement each other? There’s kind of a “scattering” at work. There are a lot of moving parts to consider, and as a scientist could tell you, entropy suggests that it’s more likely your channels will start looking rag-tag than hang together. That is, without a dedicated strategy and a good amount of vigilance.
Universalism in Multichannel Work
All of your business channels are this great big puzzle, and all of the pieces need to fit.
Increasingly, companies are creating comprehensive style guides for branding across social media and other digital channels. They’re trying to streamline universal messaging and make sure that customer experience remains the same across all of these channels.
Think about user experience (UX). It’s guided by elements of what a seasoned market might lay out in a thick binder marked “customer journey.” In terms of channels, the idea of Unified Communications (UC) has emerged to talk about how top-level planning works, and, in the era of software-as-a-service, UCaaS (unified communications as a service) is yet another vendor offering that you can elect, although, like all of the rest of those SaaS tools, it’s going to come with a price.
Another alternative is to come up with you own in-house comprehensive plan for channels, and stick to it. A plan like this is one of your best practices and resources for multichannel consolidation. At Websubstance, we help companies come up with these types of plans. We have all of the best resources to help you to streamline and universalize your channels, scale with grace and consistency, and “win at the Internet.” Give us a call.
