A Marketing Strategist’s Guiding Star: The Objective

Multi-channel marketing (MCM)—the strategy of surrounding your target audience with a series of unified and compelling messages with related calls to action—is at the core of effective brand response marketing that drives user engagement. This is the opposite of delivering non-aligned messages that could potentially be in conflict with one another and hence negatively affect your outcome. 

The key ingredient of an effective MCM communication strategy is alignment on the objective. A well-constructed measurement plan defines the level of success against that objective. Examples of common marketing objectives include:

• Delivering leads for a sales team to cultivate
• Delivering percentage growth in sales
• Driving website traffic to view an article or a video asset

Each of these examples requires a uniquely created communications strategy to deliver a seamless MCM user experience that informs the creative brief. It is imperative you keep the objective top of mind as you flesh out the details of the following consideration set:

• Identifying your target audience (Will you segment the audience?)
• Messaging
• Offer(s), the call to action
• Creative (branding, look and feel)
• Channel selection
• Deployment considerations (optimization testing)

Be sure to revisit the program objective if you are including a test and learn plan, which will ensure that your testing strategy includes properly aligned testing stimuli and control and test audiences. This will guarantee your ability to identify the variable or set of variables that influenced your test results.

Furthermore, if the objective changes during the course of the program, pause and reassess for potential impact. Ensure that your audience, messages, offers, and the selected communication channels are still appropriate. If not, you will want to consider adjusting to reflect the change in objective or discontinuing the program altogether.