Your marketing campaigns’ success does not depend alone on the lead generation activities by your team. A large percentage of leads are abandoned by sales simply because the prospect did not respond to a few contact attempts either through phone or email. As a marketer, we realize that high conversion rates are not possible by relying on a single channel to communicate with our customers. With an explosion of multiple online channels like social media, rich media content, there are new ways to engage your leads.

To realize marketing goals, you need to create multi-channel marketing campaigns that connects with your leads all the time. Moreover, for better ROI, low customer churn rate and high customer satisfaction, your efforts should focus on creating ‘Unforgettable Marketing Campaigns’.

If you are using the traditional marketing model that involves single customer touch points, chances are, you cannot do the above. However, with marketing automation, creating multi-touch campaigns is easy and simple.

Why Multi-Touch Marketing Works?

In 2013, Mashable reported that 72% of consumers prefer an integrated marketing approach, yet some businesses are still hesitant to dive into cross-channel marketing. Traditional marketers rely on qualifying leads using a single channel and then assign a sales rep to a lead. But now, TIMES HAVE CHANGED.

A typical customer would have accessed as many as 23 touch points before he is even ready to talk to your sales rep. You have to reach out to your customers on every platform that they are using. Additionally, you should have capabilities to tie back all the interactions via those touch points to figure out what cinched the deal.

With multi-touch marketing, you can:

• Improve campaign performance
• Plan and forecast Marketing expenditure
• Accelerate velocity of sales cycle
• Achieve your marketing goals
• Streamline your marketing strategy

Think about it: the post that your prospect just liked on Facebook, that webinar you hosted a week back, the whitepaper he downloaded a month back or a cold call your sales rep made 2 weeks back. All these touch points bring your prospect closer to becoming a customer.

How to Create Multi-Touch Campaigns

As a marketer, you need to understand the influence of every campaign that you execute. Your customers are everywhere and you need to be there, even before your customers. Nevertheless, being consistent during this exercise is hard. Integrated multi-touch marketing campaigns can change this.

To get started, you should start with choosing the channels that are going to create maximum impact, follow a checklist for each channel, execute the campaigns and then tie back the cinched deal with the touch point in the campaign.

Before you plan to get started with multi-touch marketing campaigns, you should:

• De-silo your channels: With so many marketing channels and unclear understanding of the impact of each channel on the customer journey, success of the campaign can dilute. For successful multi-touch marketing campaigns, build consensus on an action plan based on individual knowledge, shared learning, team collaboration, and a deep understanding of the consumer journey.
• Use A/B and Multi variate testing For successful marketing campaigns, you need to test each channel. When you identify the winners, you can easily incorporate them to improve your campaign performance.
• Know your personas: Get clarity on which channels your target audience frequently visit and how do they interact within and with those channels.

Marketing automation software like Marketo helps you to do all of the above with simple clicks. It enables you to deliver end-to-end programs with ways to measure ROI. Why we chose Marketo? We are ardent fans!

Multi-Touch Attribution with Marketo

With Marketo, build multiple touch points with a lead nurture plan. Here is an example for a multi-touch nurture program.

Now, after you create a multi-touch campaign, you can use Marketo’s Opportunity Influence Analyzer to identify programs, email campaigns, events that created an impact on converting your lead into a customer. After you execute a stream of campaigns for lead nurturing, it is critical to identify the best way to measure the performance of all the multi-touch campaigns.

• By Time: You can weigh the touches based on when they happened during the sales cycle. This approach works best when you tie up the behaviour with something that happened recently. For e.g. your prospect became a lead after last week’s webinar and the whitepaper they downloaded three months back has less to do with it.
• By Role: You may give more weight to programs that touched the key decision maker than those affecting other influencers. Just be sure your weighting matches your business realities – a CEO should not be weighted more heavily than a Manager if he or she has little impact on the deal.
• By Program Type: You can also weight based on the level of engagement. For example, attending a two-hour seminar may have more impact than a simple website visit. However, be careful not to give more weight to more expensive programs just because they cost more.

With clear picture of performance of your campaigns, you can identify the channels that you can optimize to increase your marketing ROI.?

Conclusion

Times have changed. Multi touch marketing is the only way to engage your leads, make better marketing campaigns, and boost marketing ROI. However, to measure the effectiveness of these campaigns easily, you should deploy marketing automation software like Marketo.

About Grazitti’s Marketo Services

Grazitti’s Marketo certified professionals implement, deploy, and manage Marketo solutions to leverage Marketo’s robust platform for highly focused marketing solutions. Companies like Tidemark, Appcelerator, Cloudwords and many others trust us for their Marketo needs. We offer:

• Setup
• Integration
• Development
• Design
• Lead Management
• Lead Engagement
• Lead Nurturing
• Reporting

To get your Marketo instance up and running to track and optimize your multi touch campaigns, just drop a line at info@grazitti.com.

Image Credits:

1. http://blog.weemss.com/assets/marina/Event_marketing_inspiration.jpg