The Efficacy of Multichannel Marketing in an Over-Saturated Market

Can multichannel marketing strategies still effectively penetrate the increasingly over-saturated market, or do they risk diluting marketing efforts and wasting precious resources?

Do you recognise this: you search and click on various platforms, and suddenly you find the exact offer you are looking for. You click through to the seller and get an even better offer-you-can’t-refuse. When you try to remember where you first saw it, you can’t: was it a search engine hit, a social media ad, or something else? It feels like someone has been able to read your mind. That’s multichannel marketing at its best.

But often things work differently: you get irrelevant ads, not just one but many, or you can’t trace back that one interesting offer or promotion. And instantly you receive one or more newsletters that you never subscribed to. They often are barely distinguishable from spam and bring irrelevant content that just irritates. That is failing multichannel marketing. 

In a market that is increasingly over-saturated, the latter trend seems to get worse. This article aims to explore the complexities and challenges of implementing multichannel marketing in a highly competitive environment and provides some direction on how to deal with them.  

Main Multichannel Marketing Challenges for Businesses

With people spending on average between 6 and 7 hours daily online and with many screen-centred jobs, an individual person is exposed to tens of thousands of digital impulses each day. With geopolitical events fuelling inflation and growth stagnation, today’s digital landscape has become hyper-competitive. Can multichannel marketing strategies still effectively penetrate the increasingly over-saturated market, or do they risk diluting marketing efforts and wasting precious resources?

As the number of channels and offerings is continuously increasing, another challenge is to master this ever-growing complexity. Note that ‘channels’ does not just refer to categories such as ‘Social Media’, ‘websites’, etc., but to each channel within these categories. For example, ‘Social Media’ includes LinkedIn, Xing, Reddit, Quora, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. as separate channels, each with its own unique audience, content format, and engagement style.

As Neil Patel summarises it, companies cannot build a business through one channel anymore. The reason is simple: omnichannel marketing reduces CPA (cost-per-acquisition) with roughly 9-11% and customers hop channels frequently. When making go-to-market decisions, companies need to add target audience channels to product-market combinations. Which ones do the different target audiences use? What investment levels in marketing and sales automation, and in content creation do they require? What is the anticipated CPA and ROI of different omnichannel-mixes and scenarios?

From Multichannel Marketing to Omnichannel Marketing for Better Customer Experience

Let’s first look at the three critical concepts in the context of our topic. 

• Customer Experience (CX): The complexity of emotional and rational perceptions that a customer forms through interactions with a company across its array of touchpoints.
• Multichannel Marketing: Coordinating marketing efforts across different channels to reach and engage customers, starting with the business perspective.
• Omnichannel Marketing: Orchestrating marketing efforts across all relevant channels to reach and engage customers, starting from the customer perspective, as a true customer-centric concept.

To maximise CLV (Customer Lifetime Value), businesses need to connect to customers through all relevant channels and provide the best Customer Experience, while balancing the cost to ensure the maximal ROI (Return on investment).

Most of my clients support optimising multichannel marketing: they have a website, a YouTube account, a mailing tool, LinkedIn company and personal pages, podcast channels, blog channels, etc. They understand the benefit of integrating branding, content, and timing through these channels, ensuring the target audience receives more consistent and relevant messaging and information, and they seek help to implement this. Their approach however is still business-centric, as it limits marketing efforts to the channels that are already in place or some additional channels ‘that others use as well’. 

Multichannel marketing leaves out answering the key question: Which channels do potential customers really use? This is the starting point of omnichannel marketing. Alongside understanding target audiences’ pains, companies also need to understand their channels, and start using them. This requires organisations to reserve sufficient budget for market and customer research to define their Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP’s), marketing personas and messaging building blocks. 

It also requires them to invest into Customer Engagement Automation (CEA) to integrate the insights into their marketing, sales and service decision-making and execution engines. While ICPs and persona research and automation are of strategic importance, individual customer and target person profiles may differ and should be taken into account as well. 

Omnichannel Marketing Operational Objectives to Maximise Customer Experience

Once you have secured a good understanding of your target audiences, marketing execution brings the next level of challenges to be addressed: to produce communication that is heard. There are three operational strategic objectives that makes sure you are organised and prepared:

Avoid Channel Overload – Too much content clouds the messaging and could cause negative impact to persons in your target audience. It may lead to decision paralysis, stall cognitive abilities, cause distrust in and blindness for marketing messages and make customers more selective about their channels. It also makes marketing attribution more difficult and channel-level KPI-measurement more complex, which reduces confidence in marketing ROI.

Deliver Consistent Messaging – Keeping the quality, quantity and timing of your marketing content and communication consistent avoids customer confusion. It strengthens your messaging and it helps build credibility, brand trust and reputation. Steps to establish and preserve this consistency include assigning someone in your marketing team as consistency gatekeeper, establishing a taxonomy and using modular texts that can be applied on any medium. Here Generative AI can be of great assistance.

Ensure Personalisation – In essence any business or consumer transaction is about building a trust-relationship. To secure that, a buyer wants to be respected, valued and understood. Customers ask for relevant, valuable information that they don’t have, for reminders of things they want to know, at the moments that they need it or are ready for it, on any channel they interact with a company. Leveraging predictive and generative AI will help you to achieve better and faster personalisation of your marketing assets.

A Strategic Framework for Effective Omnichannel Marketing Implementation

Omnichannel marketing as the evolution of multichannel marketing is a key discipline for demand generation to succeed in an over-saturated market. As this is of crucial importance, a marketing strategy should create the conditions and provide enablement to execute it. This means upfront decisions by company and marketing leadership on the priorities, the investments, the implementation path and the KPIs. Omnichannel marketing can be effective in an over-saturated market, but only when executed strategically. Summarised into a framework this looks as follows:

1. Automation: Invest in Customer Engagement technology cross customer journey (MarTech + SalesTech + ServiceTech) to enable a seamless Customer Experience across the full Customer Experience and Lifetime. Prioritise a fully connected Customer Data Platform (CDP) and Cloud Data Warehouse (CDW) to provide customer insights and record their behaviour.
2. Insights: Invest in customer data that for each ICP and persona identifies pains, needs, channels, and messaging that lands. Don’t stop there: conduct individual decision maker research and master personalisation. Use external and internal sources and apply Predictive AI.
3. Operations: Establish an operational set up and processes that enable utilisation of a., b., and d., while fulfilling the three operational strategic objectives discussed above. 
4. Metrics: Be clear and transparent while leveraging your whole organisation, have simple KPI’s and relevant dashboards for all. Establish a company-wide-process to share and enrich customer insights, to design and execute fitting messaging, to communicate performance and to adjust over time.

As markets continue to saturate, the winners will be those who adopt a customer-centric approach to multichannel marketing. By understanding their audience deeply, crafting cohesive messages, and delivering personalised experiences across carefully chosen channels, businesses can cut through the noise and achieve meaningful connections with their customers. In the end, it is not about being everywhere, but about being in the right places with the right message at the right time.