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How to Implement Cross Channel Marketing With a Hybrid CMS

Jason Smith

Consumers are more connected than ever before. The number of channels has done nothing but increase, and nowadays, a single-channel strategy won’t be enough. According to Statista, mobile devices (excluding tablets) generated 51.53% of global website traffic, consistently hovering around the 50% mark since the beginning of 2017.

For companies, the challenge is to provide users with more opportunities to purchase in a hyperconnected world. Cutting through the noise is a must for those that want to communicate with their users across several platforms.

That being said, marketing using only one channel, restricts access to a large portion of your target audience. Also, by only focusing on a single channel, you run the risk of alienating the rest of your customers, preventing you from nurturing the leads you have.

With that in mind, in this post, we will show you how to implement cross channel marketing using dotCMS.

What Is Cross Channel Marketing?

Many brands are already aware of the concept of omnichannel marketing. Omnichannel involves using every channel at your disposal to help visitors convert. Yet, in an omnichannel strategy, your marketing efforts run parallel to one another instead of presenting one cohesive interaction.

Cross channel marketing, on the other hand, blends your marketing channels in such a way that it creates a logical progression from one stage to the next as users go from one channel to the other.

For example, a cross channel approach would look like this. A potential customer reads a post you wrote about something your business solves; then, they get an email with a testimonial about how another customer was able to solve that same issue. Later, when this lead goes to social media, they’ll see an ad that again talks about the issue and how your company can solve it. As you can see, it’s all about amplifying the same message and reinforcing it across channels in a cohesive way.

Another example is Starbucks and its Frappuccino Happy Hour Campaign, which used a conjunction of TV ads, digital experiences, and social media. The company ran a 10-day campaign that created a narrative behind the Unicorn Frappuccino, turning the beverage into a viral sensation and boosting the company’s sales.

In a nutshell, cross channel marketing can improve campaign performance in three significant ways:

  • By increasing engagement at every touchpoint with personalized offers,
  • By improving customer loyalty with offers delivered across every device,
  • By making it more transparent for marketers to assess the individual ROI of each channel.

Now, let’s take a look at how to start a cross channel campaign and how a hybrid CMS can help marketers deliver better digital experiences.

How Does a Hybrid CMS Empower Your Cross Channel Marketing

While most marketers know the importance of a cross channel marketing strategy, according to Gartner, only 40% of marketers surveyed say using advanced techniques to reach audiences at the right moments remains their top multichannel marketing challenge.

This means that more than half of marketers aren’t really leveraging technology as they should or maybe they’re not using the right tool. Here’s where a hybrid CMS can help, making it simple for marketers to deliver contextual experiences and weave narratives across channels.

With a hybrid CMS, marketers can optimize every touchpoint, tweak every experience, and manage all the aspects of content authoring and delivering. These are some of the features that come with dotCMS that make it a breeze for marketers to dominate cross channel marketing.

Drag and Drop Interface

In a hybrid CMS, the marketing team will still have all drag and drop capabilities at their disposal. This is fundamental for an efficient and streamlined authoring experience in a
CMS because it speeds the content creation time and streamlines delivery.

Edit Mode Anywhere

Edit Mode Anywhere enables content creators to edit the content and layout that extends to externally developed apps via dotCMS. With the help of Edit Mode Anywhere, marketers can create SPAs and PWAs that have been built using dotCMS’ layout as a Service API, extending the range of their cross channel strategies.

NoCode Platform

A NoCode platform makes it easier for marketers to deliver cross channel marketing experiences without the help of the development team. NoCode enables marketing teams to build all kinds of digital experiences without the involvement of the IT department, reducing the number of hours devs spend maintaining the site.

Personalization and Content Targeting

dotCMS allows marketing teams to target users granularly and create relevant experiences across every channel and touchpoint in the customer journey. dotCMS is perfect for teams managing 1, 10, or even 1,500+ channels, including desktop, mobile, and the IoT because it is the glue that helps bond your cross channel marketing.

How Do You Start A Cross Channel Marketing Campaign Using A Hybrid CMS?

Keep in mind that prospects will not only interact with your website but also with every single one of your digital properties. If all the messages you send are different, chances are prospects will be confused. On the other hand, if your message is solid, they will be more likely to remember you.

Before trying to activate every channel, you need to make sure that you have an overall strategy in place; you need a cohesive strategy that uniquely leverages each channel while still reaching the same goal. In a nutshell, you need to be able to tell the same story to each prospect, but in several different ways according to the channel.

To help you get started, here are some ways you can leverage a hybrid CMS to deliver a consistent cross channel experience.

Start By Unifying All Your Content

The first step to a successful cross channel strategy is to unify your data, so every piece of information you own stays in the same place. At the same time, it’s important that you have all the data you need to capture your leads’ attention.

With dotCMS, all your content is stored in a central content repository, and all the pages that use the content are linked to it. This allows for content to be reused across channels because the content lives in a database separated from the presentation, or the channel the content will live.

Continue By Segmenting Your Audience And Personalizing Content

The next step to a successful cross channel strategy is to analyze your customer data and create a clear picture of the segments within your database so you can determine which channels to prioritize. It’s also crucial to document and contextualize each interaction so that you can increase your campaign effectiveness.

With dotCMS, you can document, contextualize, and personalize each interaction using visitors, personas, and rules. Visitor objects enable marketers to identify each visitor and keep data about him or her, Personas allow visitor categorization into different groups of interest, and rules enable marketers to assign personas to visitors as they browse through, recording their interests.

Finish By Unifying Interactions

Once your customers are analyzed and segmented, the next step in the process is to unify all those data points into custom content that matches each visitor’s needs. Using dynamic content, for instance, marketers can deliver customized content according to their users’ touchpoints. Using APIs, dotCMS can perform actions on a content object and edit content depending on each visitor, updating or translating content as needed.

Jumpstart Your Cross Channel Marketing With dotCMS

Building a cross channel marketing strategy enables marketers to weave a narrative across devices that can bring massive gains to companies and brands alike. Using a hybrid CMS marketers unify every data point and show users content aligned with their needs.

For example, White Castle, the oldest fast-food chain in America, uses dotCMS to power their cross channel marketing campaigns. They rely on dotCMS’ content tagging and personalization tool to improve the accuracy of their content offering and what shows throughout their site.

Hybrid CMSs help marketers deliver outstanding digital experiences in both omnichannel and cross channel strategies. If you want to learn more about dotCMS’ hybrid capabilities, read our white paper on ‘Why dotCMS is Your Hybrid Solution’.

Jason Smith
Chief User Experience Officer
September 28, 2020

Filed Under:

hybrid cms

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