Catherine Langman:
Well, hello there. It’s Catherine Langman here back with another episode of the Productpreneur Success Podcast. Today on the show, you’re here with yours truly. I’m going to be here giving you a mini training today, and it’s going to be a session all about marketing across multiple channels, so multichannel marketing, and how we can and should be running our marketing so that we can get the best end results for growing our brand and growing our revenue in our online store.
Catherine Langman:
We’re also going to dive a little bit into how we can work out what we should be doing with our marketing to get to that best end result. Nothing light and fluffy for today. I’m actually recording this in the very early November. It’s been a big year. It actually kind of caught me off guard that it is actually November as I’m sitting here recording this episode. It’s been a really big year, hasn’t it?
Catherine Langman:
I mean, just from a digital marketing perspective, we’ve gone through some pretty big changes in the industry, changes to privacy, which is a good thing, but has absolutely impacted the way that we market online and reach our customers and engage with our customers. And of course, loads of other stuff going on in the world that’s impacting us personally as well. I guess, when it comes to being able to continue to grow our business, there definitely has been a sense of overwhelm and confusion and a little bit probably of fear as well, like what am I doing?
Catherine Langman:
What if it’s not going to work out? What’s going to work next year, given there’s been so many changes? So with all of that that’s been going on, we’re going to dive into this topic today and I think you’re going to find it really helpful. As a marketing agency owner myself, I definitely have a lot of clients and potential clients coming to me and coming to our business thinking and wanting to talk about what’s the next big thing in digital marketing or advertising.
Catherine Langman:
And I’m sure that listeners, you probably see this going on maybe in Facebook groups or similar all the time where you’re just like, “What do I need to do,” and somebody will say, “Oh, you got to get onto Reels. It’ll absolutely change your business.” People come to us and they think, “Oh, I just need to try this one thing. I just need to put maybe Facebook Ads in or just need to do this one thing and it’s going to change my business and it’s going to be the answer to everything, and then everything will be hunky dory after that.”
Catherine Langman:
Unfortunately, this kind of an approach is rarely ever successful. It might make a positive change in the short-term. But when you only invest in one marketing channel, you are really narrowing your reach, and you are taking a big risk. I think anyone who has seen their business be turned upside down by the advent of the Apple iOS 14.5 update and all of a sudden the way Facebook advertising used to work stopped working that way. There were whole businesses that were built on running their marketing in just that one way.
Catherine Langman:
And all of a sudden, that stopped working and they didn’t have anything else to fall back on. It’s risky for that kind of a reason. This is a sort of thing that’s upset businesses numerous times over the decades. For example, when free Instagram was brilliant and whole businesses were built on that, and then all of a sudden, it became a pay-to-play thing. That obviously upset a lot of businesses. In the past, it was the same with Facebook.
Catherine Langman:
And earlier than that, I’ve seen this happen with SEO as well, where people had built their entire traffic and sales strategy off organic search. And then all of a sudden, that dropped off a cliff because they had no control over it. Certainly it is risky to only invest in one marketing channel.
Catherine Langman:
But aside from that, you are narrowing your reach really significantly, because you will find that there are audience members or potential audience members for your brand that just aren’t engaging with that platform, and so you won’t reach them at all, or you’ll find that there might be some of your audience who might engage with a platform at maybe some stage of their buyer journey, like at the awareness stage, or they might just be engaging with some fun content, but they might not be compelled to buy just yet.
Catherine Langman:
If you are only marketing on one channel, you really are leaving a lot on the table. This is where we start to think about multichannel marketing as a term. What is it about what we call multichannel marketing that’s so important for brands today? And really it’s about leveraging different marketing tactics and different platforms so that you can interact and engage with a much wider range of customers and potential customers and do so in a variety of ways.
Catherine Langman:
And of course, the goal is to use these different channels, to ensure that we are getting our messages across to our target audience, regardless of what devices they’re using, or what communities they hang out in, or what technologies or platforms that they might use or not use. Just an example, straight off the bat here I have… Well, actually I have many brothers and sisters, but I have one sister in particular who is the closest to me in my family physically and age wise.
Catherine Langman:
We’re very similar age and tastes in a lot of different things, but she’s a designer and she is a very visual human being. She hangs out on Instagram and engages with brands on Instagram and not really on for Facebook. I’m more of a word person. I like to read things. I’m not so much of a picture person. And so I don’t really hang out on Instagram and engage with brands there, but I would do so more on other platforms where it’s all about the written word. But ultimately, we would be buying good prospects for very similar brands.
Catherine Langman:
We really need to make sure that we are communicating with our audience and our potential audience across multiple different platforms. For brands who are selling direct to consumers, as opposed to business to business, being able to market to your audience across multiple channels, it’s also about giving your consumers and your audience a choice in how and where they do interact with your brand. Consumers do have more power today over how they are marketed to. This is this whole 24 hour new cycle thing that can feel a little bit overwhelming.
Catherine Langman:
But realistically, the days are gone where trusting that our customers are going to see our billboard message hidden among all the other noise cluttering the marketplace is just not there anymore. Whereas using multiple channels to communicate our marketing messages is going to increase the likelihood that your message will be seen by a really good variety of your customers. You’re going to really pull in a much broader segment of your potential audience and hopefully do so in ways that they’re individually going to find engaging.
Catherine Langman:
I guess I’m not really saying anything new here, right? You all know probably that we need to be using various different channels to communicate. I think you all know, yes, I’m a brand owner. I’ve got to have my own website. I’ve got to be on Facebook. I’ve got to be on Instagram, maybe TikTok, or wherever your audience is hanging out. You might have audiences on Snapchat and Pinterest as well or LinkedIn and email marketing and blah, blah, blah. We know all of this, right?
Catherine Langman:
But it can feel quite overwhelming to think that we have to create marketing content for all of these different channels. This is definitely what I see. I had a mentor a little while ago who used the phrase that kind of funny in the moment, but also true. He used the phrase poo-poo platter style of marketing, and this is what can happen. It’s tempting to just throw out different content and different messages and different themes to see what sticks and what doesn’t stick.
Catherine Langman:
We’re putting different stuff out on different platforms and just seeing what flies or just flying by the seat of our pants. Sometimes we might look at whether it works or not and sometimes we might not look. At the end of the day, it’s a very inconsistent way to approach it, and it’s also not taking into consideration how your customer is going to experience that content, right?
Catherine Langman:
So not only is it feeling overwhelming because you’re creating a lot of content for these different channels, but it’s also not actually having the impact that you want because it’s a poor experience for the consumer. Does that make sense? So really the key to winning at this multichannel marketing game is not just putting marketing content out on these different channels. It’s actually ensuring that it’s a holistic, consistent message as well. This is where the term omnichannel can come in.
Catherine Langman:
I’m not actually a massive fan of all of these different pieces of jargon, these jargony words. I don’t know if they mean much to my audience. But anyways, that’s the technical term, omnichannel. Really it’s just about having the same message going out to your audience. It’s a consistent message delivered out to your audience across these different channels.
Catherine Langman:
You’re not having a different communication strategy for Facebook and a different communication strategy for Instagram and a different one again for your email marketing, or a different one again for your blogs, or wherever that you’re putting content out, right? It’s a unified consistent message across channels. At the end of the day, if we can do this, our audience is going to be provided with that consistent experience across the channels, and it’s also going to help our customers to actually take it in and remember it.
Catherine Langman:
If we are trying to communicate to people in our audience who maybe use one channel and not another one, we’re also going to have much higher success rate at pulling that audience in in its entirety if we are being consistent across different platforms. It is pretty vital that we take this approach. The good news is that it actually simplifies the process of rolling out our marketing.
Catherine Langman:
Because at the end of the day, if we can just come up with the initial strategy and the initial campaign concept, then we can come up with a bit of a list of all of the different bits and pieces that we might need. We might need to have longer form content for the blog and the website, and then we might need to have some images sized for that piece of content. Then we might need to resize those images to have a version for your email banner or your marketing emails, and again, different sizes for your social media platforms, whether it’s images or video, whatever.
Catherine Langman:
It’s about having that kind of checklist of pieces of marketing that you need to have to roll that particular campaign out to your audience across these different strategies, right? It’s actually simpler to work in that way than it is to try and just throw content out there and see what sticks on the different channels. It works more successfully to actually grow your brand and to increase your revenue because of that consistency, because we are able to really drum the message in, I suppose, is the best way to put it.
Catherine Langman:
Usually it takes several interactions with a brand or with a message or with a campaign or an advertisement or whatever it is. Sometimes it might be an incentive. Sometimes it might be a product launch. Sometimes it might be something else. But it takes several times of interacting between the consumer and the brand for that message to stick and for us, as consumers, to have enough impetus to take action and actually buy.
Catherine Langman:
Really it’s actually kind of taking us back to the way marketing and advertising worked in what I like to say inadvertent commerce, the olden days, like when I started my career. The way that I used to work just to I guess give a bit of insight, my early career was… Well, my first job was actually in a very early pure e-commerce business in 1999. But anyway, after that, I had quite a significant career at working in advertising agencies and digital marketing agencies in Sydney and Melbourne. The way that we would work is that we would be working with the brand.
Catherine Langman:
Say for instance, we’re launching out a new product. One of the brands that I worked with was RMK Shoes. If you are a woman of a certain, maybe similar age to myself, you would remember that brand and know that brand of women’s shoes. We might have a new season launch for that brand. The ad agency that I was working with, we would be the ones that would be coming up with the campaign concept, how were we going to anchor that campaign with the images. We’d be organizing this whole photo shoot.
Catherine Langman:
We would be coming up with what the look and feel and the theme of that campaign would be all about, blah, blah, blah, all of that. We did that bit, and then we would work with media buyers. This was typically, in those days, a different agency would be working out what the actual it strategy would be. They would be going, okay, well, who’s the target audience and what kind of media are they consuming? They’d be looking at everything from TV and specific TV channels, times of the day they’d be watching TV.
Catherine Langman:
They’d be looking at outdoor advertising, billboards, bus stations, and wherever you see outdoor advertising, and of course, magazines. Oh gosh, it was a fun day when you could work with print advertising in magazines. It’s not really like that anymore, is it? But it’s the same sort of thing, right? You need to start with what is the campaign going to be all about. What’s it going to say? What’s it going to look like? What do you need to do to produce that campaign, whether it’s a photo shoot or something or other else? Then the design work required and the copywriting.
Catherine Langman:
What’s going to be that kind of anchor headline, the tagline for the campaign? I think as a consumer, we’re all familiar with this stuff. You see it with Coca-Cola a lot. That’s probably one that we’re all really familiar with. If you start thinking about it and going down the rabbit hole of searching up old ads on YouTube, it’s quite fun, but you can really see it. They had that one campaign and you could see it consistently rolled out across very areas different channels and media.
Catherine Langman:
These days it is similar in that we need to understand what platforms that our customers, our ideal customer is hanging out on. Those will be the channels then that we’re going to use to share the messaging and roll out our campaigns on. It is much like the olden days of marketing and advertising, which is a good thing, because it’s kind of fun and creative to do it this way. How then do we work out what we should be doing with our marketing?
Catherine Langman:
I mean, it sounds all good to be having fun coming up with creative concepts for a campaign, but that’s not what it’s all about. Having a campaign is great for building awareness and for creating and increasing some demand for your products and encouraging our audience to take some action and buy from you. Part of that audience might be new to your brand. We all want to have some marketing that is designed to bring new people into your orbit. If we don’t have new customers coming in, then we’re probably dying as a brand.
Catherine Langman:
But we also want to be continuing to engage with and sell to our existing customers as well and have that repeat customer rate remaining pretty decent, pretty healthy. In order to work out what you should be doing with your marketing, it’s not rocket really. And what you want to bear in mind is that you want to pick from sort of three to four different growth strategies and you’re really going to have at least two of these in play all the time, if not three.
Catherine Langman:
The growth strategies that you want to keep in mind are, number one, selling your existing products to your existing customers. This is some sort of marketing in place to try and get the repeat orders. The second growth strategy is selling your existing products to new customers. This is where you are doing things to increase brand awareness and to bring new people into your orbit and to elicit that first sale from a new customer. So then you’re going to have strategies, the third one being selling new products to your existing customers.
Catherine Langman:
This is also about getting repeat customers by cross selling to other products, other new products that you might add to your range. And then the fourth one is probably the hardest and most riskiest, although if you’re new to business, this is where you start, and that’s selling new products to new customers. I don’t like to focus too much on that one usually because it is harder.
Catherine Langman:
If you’ve got an existing brand, existing products that you know how to sell and you can bring in customers, and you’ve got that ideal customer avatar there, and you know what you’re doing to sell it. But new products and new customers, they can be… It’s almost like starting again. It’s almost like a new brand, a new business with a different customer avatar, and you’ll need different marketing for that and all of that’s sort of stuff.
Catherine Langman:
The first three are really where your marketing needs to be sitting at, and then you need to think about, okay, well, what kind of marketing is going to or what kind of communication pieces is going to be engaging to my potential customers? I know my ideal customer. I need to make them aware that I exist. This is what brand reach or brand awareness is all about. You need to increase the number of people who know that you exist so that you’re not like the world’s best kept secret as a brand.
Catherine Langman:
That kind of marketing is going to be a little bit different in messaging, in execution than the sort of marketing that is designed to really just elicit that order from say a repeat customer. When it comes to your multichannel marketing, you really need to kind of break down what are the messages, the campaigns that you’re going to be rolling out, the messages, the offers that are going to really help at the different stages of the buyer journey from that initial awareness, reaching a new audience stage.
Catherine Langman:
That kind of content has got to a little bit more engaging and less salesy, right? And then the next step generally with your buyer journey is going to be getting them to act or to interact with your brand. They’re going to do this a few times usually before they’re going to buy from you, but you want to get them over to your website probably and having a good look at your products. And then, of course, you want to get them to convert. This is really where your website for starters needs to be up to scratch.
Catherine Langman:
You don’t want to have crappy images on your website or really poor product descriptions or a website that’s very difficult to use on mobile, for instance. It’s just going to make it really hard for able to actually convert and to purchase from you. And then beyond purchase, of course, we want to stay engaged with our new customers so that we can get them back to buy from us again and again.
Catherine Langman:
That initial kind of reach, audience engagement, brand awareness side of things, this is where the messaging that you roll out has to be consistent across these multiple different channels that you’re going to be using. Like I said, it’s not putting completely different content out on these different channels. It’s the consistency across channel. And then encouraging them to come into your online store, check out your products, and to buy from you, et cetera, et cetera.
Catherine Langman:
And then beyond that, having that new customer engagement content going out and you can use a lot of automation here to help you with this, personalized emails or SMS messages or retargeting campaigns you can still do to make sure that your new customers are having a great experience using your products, if there’s any requirement to educate them at all about what your products are all about, how to use them, how to have success with them.
Catherine Langman:
I mean, honestly I could go on and on and on about at the kind of content that your customers might find valuable, but the point is that you want to keep them engaged so that they are having a great experience using your products. So that when you come back to them with some additional invitations to buy from you, then they’re going to be way more receptive to that and to convert. In terms of your marketing plan, you start with choosing those growth strategies, and then you move to the specific tactics. This is the specific channels.
Catherine Langman:
This is the where, when, and what part of your marketing. Don’t assume that email marketing is a strategy. It’s a tactic really. You want to start with the strategy first, then you want to move into the tactics where you’re deciding what channels, where you’re going to place all of this marketing messaging, get that list of bits of content that you need to have, that checklist, so you’ve got all of the dimensions and the requirements for copywriting and all the other content that you need. And then you can obviously implement, but that’s not it.
Catherine Langman:
That’s not the end game there. The next step in the game is to monitor and track and review what happens. Because it’s one thing to spend time creating this awesome campaign and to roll it out and to share all of that consistent content across different channels, but you can’t leave it there. You need to keep track of what’s happening and whether it has the impact that you want in terms of driving traffic and sales in your online store.
Catherine Langman:
And if you do have that kind of regular touchpoint where you’re monitoring and you’re tracking and reviewing your progress and your performance, your performance metrics, that is the information that you need in order to improve over time. There’s that saying, what gets measured improves. The reason for that is that you have that visibility over, what’s actually going on in your business. You’re not going to hit a winner every single time you go out with a new marketing campaign. I think that’s probably foolish to think.
Catherine Langman:
But if you are regularly monitoring and tracking and reviewing your performance, then it gives you the information right at your fingertips to be able to improve and to optimize and just get better every day. For instance, one of your strategies to convert new customers would probably be to have an automated email funnel in place, so you’re getting people to sign up to your email list, and then sending out some emails to try and get that first order from a customer, right?
Catherine Langman:
If you don’t monitor the performance of those emails, it’s going to be very difficult for you to actually know for sure that the effort that you’ve put in there is working. You might be tempted after some time to think, oh, well, that a waste of time because it didn’t work. But in actual fact, you might find if you dug into the performance metrics, you might find, well, actually the open rates suck. But once people are in there, they’re actually converting at a really good rate. So maybe I need to change up my subject lines to get more people to open them.
Catherine Langman:
Or another scenario that I saw recent, the email funnel itself converted really, really well, but the opt-in form did not. If we could improve that opt-in form, then a higher number of people would actually sign up to it and the number of conversions out the other end would go up. This monitoring, tracking, and reviewing is the crucial last step of this process. All right. That was a bit of a long rant, but hopefully you found that helpful and hopefully it just kind of changes your mindset a little bit about how to use multiple channels in your marketing.
Catherine Langman:
And that we really need to be aiming for that kind of omnichannel approach, where we have the consistent messaging going out to our audience across the different platforms, rather than a different communication strategy for each different platform that we might use. Hopefully you’ll see that just having that kind of magic bullet type approach and just thinking, “Oh, I just need to try this one thing and that’s going to be the answer to all my prayers,” that’s not the way that it works.
Catherine Langman:
And I guess just as a final thing that I wanted to add here is that you could have… Say for instance, you decide to start running some Facebook Ads, either yourself or with somebody else helping you to do it. You could have the best ad strategy in the world and it might actually convert quite well. But if you are not doing any of the other things, then you will find that your results will be way less impressive than they could be.
Catherine Langman:
In our agency, the clients that we work with across multiple channels and the ones that are really consistent with all of this multichannel marketing concept, they’re the ones that are really, really gunning it. They’re the ones that are heading into the seven figures, in the multiple seven figures range. One client that we work with, MADMIA, you’ve probably seen her brand around about, especially if you have small children in Australia.
Catherine Langman:
Well, she’s international now, but she has been incredibly consistent with her marketing across all of these different platforms, and she has been able to grow so quickly and internationally as well. She’s all over the world now and lining up amazing collaborations with celebrities and things like that, which you only get to do because you’ve been doing a good job along the way and getting in front of these sorts of people, I guess. At the end of the day, try and make things somewhat simple for yourself.
Catherine Langman:
Don’t approach this whole marketing gig like you have to have different content going out in these different places, but think in terms of that campaign concept first, and then trickle it all down to what you need to be going out… The little assets that you need to have ready to go out on these different platforms. You will find that your overall results will be much greater with that combined strategy than you could ever achieve individually one platform at a time. I guess, the last thing that I’ll say about it as well is you also can’t then approach it as.
Catherine Langman:
I’ll just try this first and see how I go, and then I’ll add in another channel. At the end of the day, if you’re only going to try one thing at a time without the other platforms going out as well, you’re not doing yourself any favors. At the end of the day, you’re going to end up with more lackluster results doing it that way than if you actually have that strategic approach across multiple channels all at once. All right, guys. That’s what I have for you today. It’s probably something that’s thought provoking for.
Catherine Langman:
You have a think about how it might play out in your own brand and your own business. I guess, the first place that I would probably start is going to your performance metrics and how things are going. Do a little bit of an audit at first. And then from there, you can start planning to improve. And of course, if you do need some help with that, you are quite able to book in for a year strategy session with my team and they can help you do that audit process for you, or with you rather, help you figure out what you should be doing next in your business.
Catherine Langman:
Hope you’ve enjoyed this episode and I look forward to being with you again next week. Bye for now.