Integrated, or multi-channel or cross-channel, marketing campaigns are commonplace within all sectors now. But how do you measure a multi-channel marketing campaign?
What are the challenges?
As Peter O’Neill outlined in this article on Econsultancy, the challenges with multi-channel marketing campaign reporting are:
- “Offline marketing influences are often not captured at all
- Non marketing influences such as a friend’s recommendation or product reviews are often not captured
- Only online touch points on the same computer used to make the purchase are captured
- Purchases made offline are not captured but these could also have been impacted by online marketing and should also be used in any ROI calculations.”
Even those this article is many years old, businesses either purposefully or not, turn a blind eye to some of these challenges and continue to make decisions on a small segment of the data available.
How can you overcome these challenges?
There are three top ways you can report on multi-channel marketing campaigns more effectively:
- Use technology
As ClickZ report:
“A platform that blends all your marketing activities in one place can make it easier to keep track of the best performing channels. It can also help you to spot new opportunities that you otherwise may have missed…marketing technologies help you towards applying a data-centric mindset that can boost your strategy and your future campaigns.” - Use the KPIs that matter
Does social media follower number really matter to your bottom line? Choose metrics which offer ‘bottom line’ insights such as conversion value, conversion volume, conversion rate, source of acquisition, cost per acquisiton, etc. - Include KPIs relevant to the channels you’re using
It is possible to measure the correlation and estimated causation of offline channels. Take a look at the metrics matrix provided by Narrative to support the choosing of relevant metrics depending on your campaign and call-to-action.