For those of you who missed Week 2, allow me to reintroduce myself! I’m Aaron Wesley Means, founder of ACTIVATE Business Solutions, based in Asheville, NC. ACTIVATE has served clients of all shapes and sizes from local to national for 12+ years, has trained thousands of businesses through seminars, webinars, and conferences, and is a multiple award-winning solution provider.
In this week’s Ready, Set, Send challenge we’ll address the value and impact of a multi-channel marketing strategy. Instead of thinking of your marketing as a single approach using a single channel, you’ll want to use different channels together (think email + social + texts) to create a coordinated plan that greatly increases awareness, visibility, interest, engagement, and sales.
How you use these channels together can be explained by what we like to call the “party principle.” And who doesn't like a party? Plus, at this one, you’ll have help from Constant Contact’s own party planner Campaign Builder. So let’s dive into week 4 and discover how to use multi-channel marketing to your strengths and own the party principle to become campaign connoisseurs!
Throw a Multi-Channel Marketing Bash
You’re not always in your inbox, are you? Well, neither are your contacts. Using multi-channel campaigns is a smart strategy that reaches your contacts where they are and offers several benefits:
- It increases reach by catering to different channel preferences
- Improves engagement by building trust and familiarity
- Ensures consistent branding across all touchpoints
- Provides better data for informed decisions
- Drives higher conversion rates
- Enhances the overall customer experience
- Optimizes marketing spend for better ROI
So how can we leverage all of this information and make it work for you and your customers? We throw a party! *Not literally* but at Constant Contact we have what we call the party principle. The goal is to foster a positive, enjoyable, and memorable connection between your brand and your customers. There are three different types of parties to the party principle: The big party, the after-party, and the VIP party.
Social Media - This is your “big party” where you may not know everyone because friends of friends of friends may have been invited. But, this is an irreplaceable channel for marketing your business: it allows many people to discover you. Use this channel to engage your followers and nurture them to become true fans of your product or service.
Email Marketing - Think of email as your “after-party” where the people you know will hang with you after everyone else has left. You know who these people are because you have their email address – and you can see what they like based on what they open and click on. (In Week 6 we’ll talk about how you can reward these fans with segmented offers).
Text (SMS) Marketing - Text marketing is your “VIP party.” It’s typically a smaller list than your email list, because people only give out their phone number to businesses they trust. And it’s a channel that delivers a 98% open rate. This is an opt-in list, so be strategic - share only the most valuable updates or incentives to keep your subscribers feeling special.
Once you throw your first party, you’ll see the results in real time - in increased awareness and email subscribers, more engagement with your emails and texts, and more of what you set as your goal in Week 1. So let’s try it out by using Campaign Builder!
Work Smarter, Not Harder with Campaign Builder
Constant Contact's most impressive feature to date is undoubtedly the multi-channel Campaign Builder. When paired with BrandKit (which we introduced in Week 1) it creates entire multi-channel campaigns for you - from copy to the different templates. Obviously you’ll want to choose the channels that make the most sense for your business.
Take Campaign Builder for a spin
Let's have some fun!
Each square in our marketing bingo sheets challenges you to create multi-channel campaigns that work best for you, such as enhancing your email (think back to Week 2), creating a landing page (hey, we also did that in Week 3!), hosting an event, or scheduling a post to your social channels.
So, what are the rules? Well, this isn't your typical bingo, this is ~marketing~ bingo. So technically, there are no rules when it comes to creativity, but I suggest starting by selecting squares of actions you already do in your marketing day-to-day, and then challenge yourself by choosing squares you’d like to try. Mark off five squares in any row, column, or diagonal and you win!
Your Assignments
- Use the Bingo card and mark off what you’re already doing and try to implement a few more, for good measure! Bonus points if you get BINGO!
- Be sure to use BrandKit, if you haven’t already. This is like getting the décor for the party you’re about to throw!
- Create a multi-channel campaign with Campaign Builder.
How you’ll earn your badge
Resources
- Handout: Multichannel Marketing
- Blog: How to Create a Marketing Campaign: A Step-by-Step Guide
- Community: Broaden Your Marketing Mix
TL;DR
- Use multi-channel marketing (email, social media, SMS) to increase awareness, engagement, and sales.
- The "party principle" involves three types of parties: social media ("big party"), email ("after-party"), and SMS marketing ("VIP party").
- Multi-channel marketing boosts reach by appealing to diverse channel preferences, enhancing engagement through trust and familiarity. It ensures consistent branding, elevates the customer experience, and drives higher conversion rates. Furthermore, it delivers better data for informed decisions and optimizes marketing spend for improved ROI.
- For your assignment, use the Bingo card to mark which strategies you use in your everyday marketing and try a few new squares to really see the benefit of multi-channel marketing while using our Campaign Builder.
Aaron Wesley Means ACTIVATE Business Solutions Help others find this post by giving it kudos. Note: I am not a Constant Contact employee. |  |
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Here's our bingo card!
@KCSL 🙌🏻congrats on being the first to post your card as well as gettin BINGO!
Looks like you are very active, way to go. And I see that your focus is event-centric down the middle row. If you are hosting and managing events in Constant Contact then you already know how easy the platform is. If you haven't already, give Multi-Channel Campaign Builder a try and choose Events as one of the channels to further consolidate your time and effort even more while including Social and Email (and SMS if that's part of your strategy)!
Nice work!
Aaron Wesley Means ACTIVATE Business Solutions Help others find this post by giving it kudos. Note: I am not a Constant Contact employee. | |
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@user98333 way to go! Looks like you have almost half the tiles checked! Keep it up - maybe add one new idea or action per week or month until you are hitting bingo in multiple directions!
Aaron Wesley Means ACTIVATE Business Solutions Help others find this post by giving it kudos. Note: I am not a Constant Contact employee. | |
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Bingo! 
@HMMPLnice! You rocked out that top line for sure and I wonder if you may have double bingo... if you created an event in your Constant Contact account it likely gave options for ticketing and drafted a landing page for you in the process!
Looks like you are enjoying the social media campaign options, surveys, and more, way to go.
Aaron Wesley Means ACTIVATE Business Solutions Help others find this post by giving it kudos. Note: I am not a Constant Contact employee. | |
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A couple on the board...I have some more work to do....
@NCES Got it! Kudos on trying a new template, using the content generator for your subject line ideas and adding your industry to your profile! Keep it up and you'll have BINGO in no time! Since website visitors are a central source of potentially qualified leads, having a sign up form to join your list on your website is what I consider to be "critical" so consider tackling that next!
Aaron Wesley Means ACTIVATE Business Solutions Help others find this post by giving it kudos. Note: I am not a Constant Contact employee. | |
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The yellow smileys are the things I had already done, and the teal are ones I just tried out for the first time. Some of them aren't applicable to my situation, so I didn't try them. Thank you!
@user386358 🙌🏻 wow, very impressive, you are close to having multiple BINGOS, even! Way to go doing a lot of these already and how well done on the many you tried for the first time that were applicable. Great job.
Aaron Wesley Means ACTIVATE Business Solutions Help others find this post by giving it kudos. Note: I am not a Constant Contact employee. | |
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Currently doing stuff in yellow highlight. Making plans to do things in lavender circles. Events don't fit well with our business type.
@RitaP got it, and nice card you've got there! 👏🏻 With those new ideas you're willing to try you've got BINGO across the middle. Nice action on your MORE column as well - brandkit is priceless, and many people don't recognize teh power of that mobile app for taking and/or instantly sharing photos into the account, not to mention the business card scanner using the phone's camera! Keep up the good work.
Aaron Wesley Means ACTIVATE Business Solutions Help others find this post by giving it kudos. Note: I am not a Constant Contact employee. | |
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I did some new things myself, but I also used some things the team created.
@user9827124 impressive to say the least. Nice work, especially on those email and social columns! By the way, if you have created an event in the system, you most likely had to choose event ticketing setup, meaning you probably have BINGO there!
Aaron Wesley Means ACTIVATE Business Solutions Help others find this post by giving it kudos. Note: I am not a Constant Contact employee. | |
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