As with every Digital Cream event, the Chatham House Rule applied, so what was said cannot be attributed to any individual marketer.

But at the end of the event, the hosts of each table helpfully provided a summary of the day’s discussions.

The cross-channel marketing table was hosted by Bilal Serlaman, Marketing Manager at XentiQ. Here’s an overview of what was discussed…

Channels

First off, everyone agreed that marketers now cover more channels than ever before.

Besides social, web, search, display, and email, the participants said they also had to consider newsletters, print advertising, and trade shows as part of their multichannel strategy.

Added to that, marketers who cover different geographic regions reported that different countries use social networks in different ways.

Twitter, for example, was more useful in Indonesia than in Singapore.

And with new technologies on the horizon, such as wearables and the Internet of Things (IoT), multichannel was probably going to become even complicated for marketers in the near future.

Content

In order to handle the current load and prepare for the future, the participants said that managing content was key.

The reason for this is that each channel requires unique content. Newsletters need editorial oversight, social requires clever and short updates, and mobile has unique interface considerations.

Participants felt that trying to deliver content in a distributed way was unmanageable. Instead, they felt, marketers should first decide on key topics centrally and then repurpose topical content for all of the channels that they cover.

A whitepaper, for example, could become a blog post on the web, an infographic on social media, and a short article in an email newsletter.

Repurposing content also maintains consistency across many channels.

Data

A multi-channel strategy also provides marketers an opportunity to learn more about their customers, but only if data is captured and used properly.

The channels customers use to find out about our brands can be very illuminating, participants argued, but before we can properly use the data we have to capture it first.

Tagging media works to some extent, but the most useful data comes from the customers themselves.

And in order to get high-quality information, participants felt that we need to consider very carefully how we ask for it.

For example, marketers acknowledged that getting information from customers via a mobile channel is difficult but with the right incentive, say exclusive content, they felt that response rates were good even from mobile devices.

And once you have the data, it is equally important to use it well.

Instead of just adding another email to the database, any customer data collected should be used to find new opportunities to segment your customer base and discover new opportunities to speak with them.

Again, if customers provide you with details via mobile, then you know that mobile is a good channel to interact with them.

A word of thanks

Econsultancy would like to thank all of the client-side marketers who participated on the day, especially our table moderators, and our sponsor for the cross-channel marketing table, Oracle Marketing Cloud.

It was a lively and insightful day of discussions and we hope to see you all again next year!