Businesses in search of new products and services use multiple channels to identify, research and select vendors.

Gartner predicts that by 2025, 80% of B2B interactions with buyers and sales will happen on digital channels, which means that marketers must reach prospective clients across different platforms, channels and devices.

As an agency leader, you may have dipped your toes in multiple marketing channels, but your efforts aren’t truly unified until you create a multichannel strategy that considers the customer experience across your entire marketing ecosystem.

What makes a multichannel marketing strategy successful?

Popular digital channels like social media, search engines, SMS and email give agencies the opportunity to present different content types and messaging based on where buyers are in their decision-making process.

Offline channels like direct mail, print, radio and television help support a more comprehensive multichannel strategy.

As small business buyers gravitate towards a self-serve approach to seeking out new service providers, multichannel marketing is essential to reach them. Some key benefits of a multichannel marketing approach:

• It gives you a single view of your customer: Multichannel marketing forces you to unify your customer data, providing insight into how customers are interacting with you across multiple touchpoints. It provides visibility into a holistic buying journey that often involves multiple interactions between the buyer and the vendor before a decision is made to purchase a product or service.

• It enables consistent messaging: Since a multichannel marketing strategy considers every phase of the buying journey, it allows you to create a cohesive plan with content and creative that remains consistent across platforms, devices and channels. This makes for a better overall customer experience.

• It increases reach: The goal of multichannel marketing is to reach customers across the many touchpoints and channels they use during the buying journey. The multichannel approach increases reach by ensuring your content and brand appear where buyers are likely to be, including in digital spaces like peer review websites, social media, SMS and email, but also offline via direct mail, radio/television and in-person industry events.

7 steps to creating a multichannel marketing strategy

There are many moving parts to consider when developing a multichannel marketing strategy, but getting started doesn't have to be overly complicated. The following steps provide a good road map for agencies who want to move from a single channel to a multichannel marketing approach.

01. Establish goals and KPIs

Define the goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) for your campaign. You can start by benchmarking past campaigns to determine which tactics and channels have worked well for your agency. Goals should be tied to measurable results—rather than focus on superficial metrics like clicks, sales and conversions. The total number of conversions isn’t as important as which channels drive the highest value leads.

Evaluating existing and past clients can help you identify which channels are most likely to resonate with your highest value prospects. Nailing down clear objectives will help inform which channels to prioritize and what creative approaches to take.

02. Identify your buyer personas

Creating buyer personas, or fictitious representations of the type of customer your agency wants to target, helps you understand who your audience is and the challenges they face. This will shape how you approach them when designing your multichannel strategy.

Include details like industries you're targeting, decision-makers you want to reach with your messaging (e.g., marketing managers), and key pain points your agency can solve.

03. Choose the right channels

Think carefully about which channels will be most effective in reaching your target customers and how you can use them strategically. It's a safe bet that digital channels like social media, search engines and email will be effective, but dig deeper to identify which specific platforms and touchpoints will resonate with your audience.

According to Gartner, Facebook and YouTube were the top social networks used in making a recent B2B purchase decision. Keep this in mind when creating content, since the type of content you create for YouTube (for example) obviously differs from text-based platforms like Twitter. Don't forget that your website is also a channel - and an important one - that will become the focal point and destination for many of your other initiatives. It should set the tone for the rest of your channels’ branding.

04. Create singular messaging for all channels

Your content should be unified across channels. Use the same messaging and visuals should be so that when customers move from one channel to another, they’ll recognize your brand. Keeping the message consistent will also help with scalability—as more channels are added, you won’t have to create separate strategies for each of them.

That said, make sure you understand the nuances of each channel. For example, LinkedIn is ideal for reaching high-level decision makers, whereas Twitter is better for reaching a larger audience and generating brand awareness.

05. Develop a content strategy

Create a content strategy that outlines what type of content you want to publish and when—from weekly blog posts to monthly emails. Creating content for each channel can be time-consuming, which is why it helps to create a unified set of visuals and messaging so that you can quickly adapt the content to different channels.

Make sure you consider your website when planning content. Content like an informative "About" page and a regularly updated blog keeps your website current, while helping target keywords specific to your niche.

06. Integrate your channels into one consolidated publishing platform

Having a consolidated platform for publishing, tracking and measuring your campaign and performance data is essential to creating an effective multichannel marketing strategy.

Wix Partners can use their agency dashboard to track all channels in one place and get insights into how customers interact with them. You can also use the platform to streamline communication across departments and manage workflows more efficiently. Wix also provides tools like Wix SEO, and Google Ads by Wix to maximize traffic and brand awareness.

07. Use analytics to measure and optimize performance

Campaign analytics are key to understanding how customers interact with your content across channels and what kind of return you’re getting on your investment. Using tools like Wix Analytics Insights helps you measure website engagement metrics like clicks, views, conversions and time spent on a given page.

You can use this data to understand what content resonates with your website visitors and inform how you plan to leverage content, campaigns and channels in the future.

Agency multichannel marketing examples:

• A buyer views an agency's video on YouTube, then visits their website for more information about a service or topic. They sign up for the mailing list. That same buyer then receives an email from the agency, prompting them to sign up for a webinar expanding on the topic from the original video.

• The tech lead for a buying group navigates from a Google ad to a landing page where they download your whitepaper about effective mobile design. That same lead sees an ad on LinkedIn for an article your agency CEO wrote about the importance of mobile design. This prompts them to return to your website to schedule a 30-minute needs assessment.

• The owner of a local flower shop wants to update their website. They ask for vendor recommendations via a marketing group on LinkedIn. When your agency comes up as a recommendation, they visit your website and download an eBook. This enables you to begin an automated email marketing campaign educating them about the services you provide and highlighting your expertise in their business category.

Embrace a multichannel approach

A successful multichannel marketing strategy requires a unified message and an understanding of how customers interact with each channel. That means creating a singular message for all channels backed by the right content strategy. Be sure to identify the right KPIs to measure and use analytics to optimize your performance.