Cross-Channel Marketing: How and Why Amazon Brands Should Sync Ads Across Different Platforms

If you are struggling to cut through the noise to get your message heard, this article will provide you with some clarity on how to organize your advertising activities across different channels and how each channel depends on the other.

What is Cross-Channel Marketing

The digital landscape is shaking everything up. The way companies are reaching people has changed and now new channels leading the way are social media. What’s more, today it’s no longer enough to just put content in one place if you want to be successful. You need to distribute it across the entire ecosystem of the marketing mix. It not only makes your content more accessible, but it can also develop a deeper level of engagement with your customers by actually providing them with the content they want when and where they want it.

According to leading social media marketing companies, cross-channel marketing is an integrative approach to marketing that exploits the synergies of social media edge and other channels to increase reach, target and convert customers.

Using cross-media campaigns to promote your brand requires deep planning and patience as you need to ensure your campaigns are part of your brand’s identity and can be expanded over time.

We will talk more about cross-channel marketing for eCommerce and Amazon brands a bit later. Now, let’s figure out the major reasons why you should use it in the first place.

Why Use Cross-Channel Marketing

According to the 2020 Omnichannel Statistics Report, the purchase rate of ad campaigns transmitted across several channels is 287% higher than one-channel campaigns.

source: Omnisend

Business Insider states that 47% of shoppers who interact with retailers through 10 or more channels buy from that retailer at least once a week, compared with 21% of shoppers who interact with one to four channels.

As you can see, the ability to market across multiple channels is already a major competitive advantage. But what else can you achieve by employing this approach?

• Enhanced Customer Relationship: Today’s consumers want to interact with brands on more than just one channel. Whether it’s touchpoints like chatbots or social media, sellers should leverage the power of cross-channel marketing to grow the number of channels at their disposal. It’s all about staying closer to shoppers.
• Increased Engagement: As businesses try to bring more customers into the fold, they realize that there is a real need for content to drive engagement. Brands that can create memorable experiences across channels with the help of engaging and useful content have bigger chances to drive consumer loyalty and decrease customer acquisition costs.
• Strong Brand Development: Think of developing a strong brand as an ongoing process beginning with the company’s story, moving on to the content, and finally finding the way to communicate it across multiple channels. Sending the message through various media, sellers build a brand simultaneously across various platforms and audiences. This way the brand is consistent across all channels. With that comes the certainty that you can meet your clients’ expectations.
• Higher Conversion and Lower CPA: different ad platforms produce different conversion rates thereby allowing you to increase conversions while reducing CPA. This is the way to drive traffic and traffic that will convert. Those are two different approaches and our job is to figure out which channel works best.

According to Gartner’s survey (see graph below), most businesses wish to increase general brand awareness with the help of cross-channel marketing.

source: Capterra

Another persuasive argument why using multiple channels for your ad campaign is so important is that digital marketing has enabled customers to more actively and constructively guide their buying decisions. Many shoppers find themselves consulting multiple channels before they make their final decision. So, customizing your interactions with potential or current customers is critical to improving conversions.

Simply put, strategically incorporating a robust multi-channel marketing approach will help you reach your target audience in a way that’s both relevant and simplest for them to consume.

How to Plan a Successful Cross-Channel Campaign

So, now you know cross-channel marketing can help companies grow their customer base more effectively, increase customer lifetime value, and decrease customer acquisition costs. However, this type of marketing requires extensive planning, experimentation, and risk management. The overall effectiveness of cross-channel marketing is dependent on the business-level capabilities to design, launch, and measure customer acquisition campaigns.

You see, developing a cross-marketing strategy is primarily about understanding the flow of information from one channel to another and how to use the data correctly. This process is now significantly more straightforward with recent Amazon updates. At the beginning of 2021, Amazon stated that sellers who drive external traffic to Amazon, that is, from any other platform, will be rewarded. The second update from Amazon was the unique linking system – Amazon Attribution. Similar to UTM links on Google, it helps keep track of any external traffic that sellers bring.

Profit Whales began to develop new strategies taking into account these updates. Because Amazon itself has provided a tool that helps track every shopper’s move and click, this prompted us to think that connecting all the channels and trying to exchange data and analytics that they generate can be the ultimate formula to developing a skyrocketing ad campaign.

What Does ZTH Have to Do with It

The main task of the ZTH structure developed by Profit Whales is to track and understand each keyword, where it is displayed, under what conditions it is displayed, and why some positions are working, and others are not. That is, it gives complete control over the semantics and the ability to promote a large number of sets of keywords (that Amazon doesn’t). We decided to scale this logic further – to recreate it in Google and other channels where it’s possible.

Amazon DSP

The Profit Whales team decided to test this hypothesis on Google since we already had the semantics ready. When we tried it on Google, we had the opportunity to launch social media targeting. But a problem arose: when targeting, you adjust everything to the audience and interests. Hence – we needed more detailed data.

Thanks to Amazon DSP (demand-side platform), we got more opportunities to launch our ad campaigns on useful sites of Amazon partners, that is, sites where Amazon ads are allowed. There are millions of different websites that help you customize your audience in more detail. What you need to do is go to your DSP dashboard, set up remarketing campaigns, and in the first or second month, you will see much richer and more detailed analytics in DSP than anywhere else.

Note: Amazon DSP is a closed functionality. You can request your own advertising account, but your budget must be more than 1k per year. The second option is to hire partner agencies (like Profit Whales). We can launch DSP for sellers with any budget.

The seller only needs to configure all the settings in the DSP in order to test and run the A/B test on other platforms and on Google. This is the logic of how you should exchange analytics and data. It is crucial to every seller, because it’s one thing to launch ads on different platforms, and it’s quite another to understand how they work and intersect.

Seller Websites

Most Amazon sellers have their own websites (Shopify, WordPress, etc.) on which they can find order data, audience insight, and other vital analytics. This is especially true for Shopify websites that provide detailed information about a customer: location, age, email, etc.

In general, the goal of running multi-channel advertising campaigns is to find the lowest CPA (cost per acquisition), that is, the place where it is cheaper for you to get a client. Using different sales channels, you can test your traffic by directing it to your website or Amazon to figure out which strategy to choose. You can also run an A/B test in which one ad leads to your website and the other – to Amazon. This will help you understand the difference in audiences, how they overlap and how to work with them further.

Profit Whales Cross-Channel Objectives

For Profit Whales, the essence of the cross-channel marketing roadmap as a whole is to study our clients’ marketing history, collect as much data as possible, and understand what cross-marketing strategy fits their businesses best. In most cases, this journey starts with Amazon, which is the most widely-used platform by sellers. In addition, it has a DSP that can be set up and provide useful insights. To accumulate even more analytics, we may sometimes optimize PPC and then employ it on Google and other sites.

For our team, it is important to understand how effective advertising is and what benefits it can provide. When we talk about a cross-channel roadmap, it’s an opportunity for us to boost organic traffic, start selling more on Amazon, and get the leading positions. Now we have more tools to achieve all that and track the results.

Useful Tips for Amazon Sellers

Your marketing strategy can help keep your company in front of your target audience. But to maximize your marketing potential, your plan has to evolve in response to how your website, social media channels, email campaigns, inbound marketing campaigns, and more are affecting conversion rates.

Here are several tips to focus on when evaluating your cross-channel efforts:

• Analytics: Any ad setup should be based on analytics as it doesn’t make sense to simply drive traffic from Google. You need to use Amazon’s data – data that has already brought you sales and success.
• Creatives: This is the part sellers often forget. Cross-channel advertising is very closely tied to creatives because you need to make sure your ads are converting well in the first place. If so, your creatives are good, and if they are good, you can use them on social media. Once they show results on social media, you can further test them.
• Results: Once you run ads on Google, you have to track the results. If the results are positive, your account can start to perform better and generate more sales. It is vital to keep track of where those sales came from. To do this, you need to share statistics across channels: what works well on one channel should be tested on other media.

Transmitting the Main Idea Across Multiple Channels

When it comes to cross-channel marketing, there is an unlimited number of moving parts to coordinate at every marketing funnel stage. From Amazon DSP to Google, social media, and whatever other channels you’re using. But to make sure everything works seamlessly, you need to make sure you’re transmitting a message your audience might feel connected to and might seed the desire to buy exactly from your store. Sometimes you might even need to hire an expert cross-channel marketing agency to help you navigate the process. But if you do everything right, your efforts will pay off.

There’s no shortage of mediums today to finally focus the critical information. Whether through emails, social media, or paid ads, there should always be the main idea for the message to be easily transmitted across different channels. Knowing how to communicate key messages and objectives across channels is the secret to successful advertising and marketing. One way to learn how to do that is by looking at the best practices and examples of those who have gotten it right and created relevant and effective ad campaigns and marketing materials.

How Many Channels Should You Use in Your Cross-Media Campaign

Okay, we’ve been talking a lot about multiple ad channels that you should use. And up to this point, you might be carrying a question in your mind: what determines the optimal number of channels in the preparation of a cross-marketing campaign?

There are lots of factors that go into deciding how many channels you should use. A customer’s needs, campaign objectives, and available budget level will assist in determining the optimum channel level necessary for ultimate success. It all depends on your campaign purposes. The goal of any online marketing promotion should be to reach the user at the right place and time with the right ad line. So, cross-media campaigns should meet users at different locations, address differing senses, and come with a rich assortment of various pieces of content.

As for the optimal number of channels that you should use in your advertising campaigns, you need to decide on the side of business metrics ( for example, ad budget ). When you run the tests, you should check how efficiently one channel performs for you. If it is effective, you can add new ones because you’ll have a larger budget as a result. If it is ineffective, you need to understand the problem and why the ad is not producing the expected results.

So basically, it’s all about testing and tracking results.

Hence, before you think about how many channels you need to use in your cross-media campaign, you need to understand what your goal is and what channel works best for you currently. A cross-media campaign sounds exciting, but there’s a problem: it is an opportunity to execute a marketing plan that has way too many channels. You need to figure out the best media channels for your business and then scale accordingly.

Major Challenges of Cross-Channel Marketing

According to a study by Gartner, ad campaigns that focus on four or more channels are 300% more successful than those with a focus on one digital channel. So, in theory, success should increase exponentially with the number of channels. In reality, however, marketers lack the experience and knowledge to set and maintain ads across more than three channels properly. This is because cross-channel marketing is not exactly a walk in the park.

Let’s take a look at problems you may be faced with by choosing this strategy.

• Cross-Channel Consistency: As sellers try to grapple with the increasing expectations of consumers, they must meanwhile constantly check their ad campaigns for data integrity, branding, and consistency. In the multi-channel model, this task becomes even more difficult due to challenges and priorities in each channel.
• A/B Tests and Results Tracking: Forecasts, experiments, numerous tests of different content, landing pages, and marketing channels, and calculating the results – all this is a must if you want to find the ad formula that works best through channels. This is complex because different customer segments that buy on different channels require different customer relationships.
• Ad Spend Monitoring: When creating a marketing plan, an advertiser should always look at the return on ad spend of each channel. Depending on the advertiser’s objectives, a click might mean a lead, a sale, a webinar registration, a newsletter sign-up, etc. To provide the best return on investment, an advertiser needs to create a cohesive, coordinated campaign across different platforms.

Advertising on different sites must be consistent. That is, the same message must be transmitted through various channels. This is very important but also quite challenging to implement.

Another tricky part is setting up ads. The seller needs to have as many different analytics as possible. For example, if one channel sells well, it is vital for you to understand the audience on that channel and what triggers them to make purchases there. Once you have the answers to this question, you can use it to test all the other channels you want to enhance. For example, if Amazon sells well, you can use its analytics to customize your campaigns on other platforms.

The third problem is data collection and analysis. In cross-marketing, one channel can influence another, but not directly. For example, if you drive a campaign from Google to Amazon, no sales will be seen from this effort except for the organic results. The seller will have to track and work with a large amount of data and try to find the relationship between interactions for each channel separately (to understand which channel brought this or that result).

You need to properly delineate all campaigns, unbundle them with links and tags, and track the results regularly.

Final Word

Cross-channel marketing is no longer an option; it’s now the only way businesses reach their customers. Running personalized, cross-channel marketing campaigns is crucial for increasing conversions. That’s precisely why it’s time for you to get onto the cross-channel marketing wagon.

We’ve seen, however, that broadly reaching across channels can be overwhelming for many marketers, who collapse under the weight of the time, resources, and tech resources needed. That is why, if you run a big store on Amazon, it is best to resort to professionals who can set up a cross-channel ad campaign while you can focus on growing and improving your business and customer experience.

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