How to Align Cross-Channel Marketing with Your Prospect’s Habits

Selling through radio ads can entail many steps beyond placing the ad. Successful radio ad campaigns may consist of several touchpoints that prospects interact with across multiple marketing channels.

For example, when businesses want to target people in a specific geographic area, local radio stations are an ideal channel. That radio ad would serve as one touchpoint among many that a prospect may encounter along the customer’s journey.

However, if your cross-channel marketing fails to reach your audience, those prospects may not be exposed to enough touchpoints to ensure they complete the buyer’s journey on your terms.

There are two key ways to find the same prospect across channels:

• Researching where they will be
• Tracking them through retargeting

Below reviews both methods, and how they can help you successfully convert those prospects into customers.

Customer Journey Research

If you want to reach the right audience, you need to have a good understanding of your ideal target and their habits. For instance, your ideal audience may spend the evening browsing the internet while listening to the radio on their way to work every morning.

Ultimately, you need to find out where your audience spends their time and where they seek answers to their questions. Some people may perform a lot of Google searches around a particular topic. Other audiences might stay on particular sites like Facebook or Quora to get the information they want.

You can learn more about the customer journey by taking certain steps during your research. These steps may include:

• Interviewing existing customers to learn about their habits and encounters with touchpoints
• Looking at competitors to see what they’re doing
• Learning about individuals your audience follows

If you can better understand the specific journey your customers take, you can determine how best to capture their attention and keep them engaged.

Retargeting

One of the best ways to align cross-channel marketing is to utilize automated retargeting. There are several types of retargeting that businesses can use to begin pushing ads to users.

The most common way to track audiences is through pixel-based retargeting. This type of retargeting is achieved through the use of a JavaScript code, which is also known as a pixel. The pixel is placed on a particular landing page or website. Once a user visits the page containing that pixel, the pixel will place an anonymous browser cookie in their browser.

As the visitor continues to browse beyond your website, the pixel activates to connect the visitor with your Facebook Ads, Google Ads, or another ad provider. Subsequently, the person who visited your site would begin to see ads for your business encouraging them to come back.

For example, let’s say you have a radio ad that plays for a certain audience, encouraging them to visit your website or a specific page. That page would contain a pixel code that could then follow the visitor around the web. Ads that the user might see could include:

• Paid search ads — text ads that appear in search results
• Google display ads — visual ads that may appear on other websites, either in or near content
• Social media ads — ads that appear through certain social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter

Use Both Methods to Reach and Engage Your Audience

The customer journey research process requires a lot more guesswork than simply retargeting with pixels. If you want to get the best results, use both customer journey research and retargeting combined.

For example, the research and retargeting process could begin with a radio ad as the initial touchpoint. Your audience will hear an ad on their favorite radio show that gets their attention. The ad contains a call to action (CTA) encouraging listeners to visit a second channel that they would normally use, which could include a specific social media site. From that second channel, you could encourage them to visit a third touchpoint in the form of a landing page on your website. That landing page contains a pixel that assists with retargeting.

As visitors browse other sites, they will see paid search ads in Google search results or display ads while reading a blog post. Eventually, they return to your website to contact you or make a purchase.

Alternatively, you could simply direct people to your retargeting landing page from your radio ads.

Regardless of which strategy you implement, you can benefit from using customer journey research and retargeting to your advantage. As you align your marketing strategies with your audience, you’ll be able to develop an efficient ad campaign that truly connects with prospects.