Modern consumers rarely spend all their time or resources on a single platform or device. Today adults, teenagers, and kids, divide their time across a wide range of mediums, devices, and platforms.
While social media platforms and mobile devices are obvious, there are other platforms, such as streaming services, mobile apps, smart TVs, and game consoles that you might typically overlook. To maximize your impact on your target audience, you need to ensure you have strategies in place to reach your customers on every device.
Cross-device marketing or cross-device targeting refers to a brand’s strategy to target users on several platforms. The key to implementing this strategy effectively is to understand your audience to ensure you know which platforms they prefer and which ones they don’t, thereby maximizing conversions and your return on investment.
Cross-device marketing is an effective marketing strategy, provided you know how to implement it. Here’s what you need to do:
Know your audience
As mentioned above, the key to succeeding with this strategy is to know your audience inside out. Before you start a new campaign or take any kind of action, you need to use whatever information you have available to evaluate and identify your target audience.
It’s quite likely that your target audience will vary from campaign to campaign or even channel to channel. Hence, it’s vital to know exactly who you’re targeting, otherwise your efforts will go to waste.
Prioritize platform experiences
You can’t devote your efforts to all platforms equally. You need to prioritize your chosen platforms according to which ones are the most important and effective for your target audience. This ranking will vary according to your industry, as well as your target audience so you need to ensure you plan this carefully to maximize conversion and engagement.
Get creative
While you can repurpose your campaigns across different platforms, it’s still important to tweak and customize it to ensure it suits the different platforms you’ve chosen. For instance, if you’re opting for mobile devices, then you need to ensure the images are optimized to be viewed on a smaller screen.
Hence, it’s vital to ensure you’re investing the time and resources required to create something unique. Each device offers a unique experience so you need to keep this in mind and create content that’s suited to this.
Write or develop your story
With competition as intense as it is today, it’s important for brands to master the art of storytelling. The same concept applies to cross-device marketing to ensure you’re telling your audience a story across different platforms.
Before the campaign goes live, it’s important to develop and plan the story to ensure you’ve taken into account all the different elements and triggers that will affect your target audience. Paying attention to the minor details will help you create highly engaging marketing campaigns that are extremely targeted.
Track and automate
The last step is to ensure that your analytics, automation, and tracking tools are in place so you can monitor conversions, ad performance, and engagements, amongst other metrics. You need to track the success of your marketing campaigns to ensure your investment’s in the right place. Tracking these metrics will help you understand which platforms are working more effectively and which ones aren’t worth investing into again.
Conclusion
To master cross-device marketing, it’s vital to understand how your target audience is using different devices. By gaining insights into your audience’s behaviors and their interactions with different platforms, you can create an experience that’s previously unheard of and set a new benchmark for your brand to measure up to.
