Engage Local Shoppers with Multi-Channel Campaigns

With more consumers spending unprecedented amounts of time online across multiple channels and platforms, it’s crucial for marketers to meet buyers wherever they are in their purchase journey—which has changed dramatically throughout 2020. However, in the age of digital everything and fast-scrolling consumers, capturing your customers’ attention and business takes more time and multiple touchpoints.  

With content consumption spread across so many different channels, setting up a multi-channel campaign is your best bet to remind them you’re there when they are in-market for your product or service.

Multi-Channel Campaigns: An Overview

Taking a multi-channel approach to your digital advertising is key to driving more traffic and sales. This is especially true for multi-location marketers who are tasked with driving traffic and sales to multiple business locations across a geographic area. A multi-channel campaign deploys relevant ads that follows your consumers around wherever they are on the Internet. This strategy has a better chance at engaging and converting customers with an optimized return on ad spend.

A sample channel mix for a location-based business could include:

• Search: Google, Microsoft Advertising
• Display: Google Display Network
• Social: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok
• Video: YouTube, Connected TV (Over-the-Top digital ads on internet TV providers like Roku and Hulu)

Each channel has its own standards and trends when it comes to advertising costs and use cases. Our team at Netsertive has seen the most success when multi-location businesses spread their advertising across at least two different channels.

For example, one strategy we often use with our customers is deploying campaigns on both Google Search Network and Microsoft Advertising. In fact, when using Netsertive’s digital advertising platform we found that the average cost per lead decreased by more than 10% when we used a blend of Microsoft Advertising and Google Ads for multi-location campaigns, compared to solely using Google Ads.

Consumers searching on Microsoft Advertising are motivated buyers with spending power, and adding in Microsoft Ads to a campaign targets a new, qualified audience of in-market shoppers. This drives down costs and increases conversions, resulting in a higher return on ad spend.

Multi-Channel Campaigns Drive Results

Utilizing multiple channels for your multi-local advertising strategies is a good way to reduce costs while driving increased performance. For example, at the end of 2019 we compared paid search traffic between 2,782 businesses not investing in Facebook ads with 200 businesses operating both paid search and Facebook ads. On average businesses investing in Facebook and paid search had 77% more impressions and 82% more clicks.

We performed the same analysis on campaigns that included paid video advertising. When we compared 2,469 businesses not investing in video with 211 businesses running both paid video advertising and paid search, we discovered that those businesses with video ads had 50% more clicks and 27% more conversions.

Multi-Channel Targets All Levels of the Sales Funnel

Deploying your advertising campaigns across multiple channels allows you to target customers at every point in their buying journey. Think of the traditional sales funnel: your advertising should call out potential customers at every point in their journey. Adding in new channels to your campaign helps drive performance for the entire campaign—because you have more and more opportunities to engage your customers.

For example, display campaigns are typically thought to target customers higher up on the funnel so they’re seen as less valuable than search, but running display campaigns will help drive upper-funnel clients into the buying phase for your business. A robust advertising campaign is most effective when it’s spread across multiple channels, giving your business plenty of opportunities to engage with new customers across your target market.

Playbook: How to Develop and Deploy a Multi-Channel Campaign

Interested in seeing how to set up a multi-channel campaign for your multi-location business? Download our free eBook, 5 Proven Ways to Increase Local Leads and Revenue, for specific examples on how to set up and run different ads for a multi-channel campaign.

If you’d like to discuss a multi-channel campaign for your business, contact us to set up a consultation.

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