What is Cross-Channel Marketing?

Hubspot defines cross-channel marketing as “blending together your various marketing channels in a way that creates logical progression for your target audience to progress from one stage to the next.” In other words, cross-channel marketing involves using different channels to make sure consistent, holistic, and seamless messaging is reaching your target audience across devices, technologies, and platforms.

The Importance of Personalized Marketing

Cross-channel marketing is the best way to reach more people, build better audience connections, and drive ROI. According to last year’s Salesforce State of Marketing report, 84% of customers say being treated like a person instead of a number is very important to winning their business. It’s so important that 69% of buyers even expect Amazon-like buying experiences – like very personalized recommendations – that only a truly cross-channel approach can deliver. Marketers have realized this need by noting it as their #1 priority; however, it’s also their top challenge. Only 49% of marketing leaders report providing an experience that completely aligns with customer expectations. High performing marketers stand out by delivering personalized messages to the right people at the right time on the right channels.

Solving Cross-Channel Complexities

Delivering personalized messaging is daunting, so many marketers avoid coordinating across paid search, social and programmatic channels due to the complexity and speed required to execute. With so many moving parts to keep track of, it can be nearly impossible for even the most sophisticated marketing teams or agencies to break down silos, sync up, and maintain consistency across audiences, campaigns and promotions.

So, how can marketers execute effective cross-channel campaigns to keep up with the rapidly changing demands of consumers? Intelligent, cross-channel marketing AI software is proving to be the only way.

Machine Learning: The Cross-Channel Answer

There are inherent limitations when people manually optimize campaigns, try to align messaging across paid channels, and aim to inform other teams about insights gleaned from campaigns. Artificial intelligence tools can manage the complexities of personalized marketing involved in cross-channel campaigns at a pace and scale not humanly possible.

Autonomous AI software can conduct time-consuming, data-intensive tasks required to compete in today’s digital advertising channels. The technology can ingest and precisely measure mass amounts of structured and unstructured data from multiple touchpoints and interactions across channels. It is technology that can learn on the fly and execute on marketers’ behalf in ways that were previously impossible. Marketers suddenly discover that it is possible to master the challenging digital advertising landscape.

Successes With AI

Albert, the world’s first autonomous marketing AI, manages cross-channel, paid digital campaigns by using a complex, multivariate approach to relentlessly evolve and optimize towards the goals marketers provide.

Within the guardrails set by an agency or brand, Albert will optimize bids, shift budgets, and test creative combinations 24/7. The intelligent machine gathers valuable insights about the customer experience in a way that has never been possible before. For example, AI can uncover ad variations that are resonating with segments of consumers at a certain stage, identify which creatives are outperforming, and unveil prospects that brands can target to increase conversions in other channels.

Additionally, Albert’s technology aligns to each brand’s source of truth to inform marketers about the contribution that each channel delivers during different customer journeys, as well as impact on total conversions. Ultimately, an AI tool like Albert helps marketers understand the most efficient paths to conversion, achieve greater visibility, and drive greater ROI.

Marketing AI isn’t just the future of digital advertising; it’s already here and is proving to be the ideal way for marketing and advertising teams to achieve cross-channel success and stay ahead of the competition.

To learn how one marketing team tied real-time insights to cross-channel digital ad campaign orchestration using Albert, read this case study.