April 21, 2025
Going From Channel to Experience with Digital Marketing: Boosting Your Presence to Integrated Marketing
You fly into your dream, remote island. Finally - you can mark this one off the bucket list. You grab your car to your 5 star hotel. When you arrive, you look out at the landscape of palm trees and white sand beaches. A breeze slightly moves through your room and carries the smell of the top-rated restaurant downstairs. You call in to confirm your 5 PM spa appointment and settle into the experience. This is the all-inclusive place you’ve dreamed of.
Take that scenario and break it into pieces. Maybe you’re in the same remote island but you have to drive to the beach, find the restaurant, and orient yourself to a new territory. As you ask around to find “best of”, you find that answers continue to change depending on someone’s understanding of the space around them. The “experience”, while looking the same on the outside, is different.
No matter where or how you advertise - you are the same brand. The same solution to everyone’s problem. But how you decide to relate to the channels you use for advertising and how you build out the association with your business also determines the type of experience someone has with your brand. Understanding where to integrate and how to make your ads interchangeable also supports a better experience for every stage of the lifecycle journey.
Often, brands make a hard swing into integrated marketing and start to consolidate everything into one experience. For instance, the person that stays in the all-inclusive resort may venture out for other experiences and come back. There are several ways you can build out your strategy to integrate or differentiate, all which supports a sustainable brand and growing channel.
Building out channels in today’s digital marketplace can be expansive - TikTok, Meta, LinkedIn, Search, Email, SMS, Push, etc continue to expand in the marketplace. In cross-channel approaches, you will use a single campaign to promote a specific amount of time (e.g. 20% off this week only). This launches simultaneously while other evergreen campaigns remain unique to channel.
Omnichannel is the experience you provide across channels. This means you have one cohesive message that goes across all channels. If someone is new to the brand, they will receive that message across all channels. If someone is returning, they will receive a different series of messages. Omnichannel marketing has the most sophistication when identifying targeted audiences before messaging and allowing everything to stay unified by the interest and activities of that group of people.
Multichannel takes out the synchronicity of all messages and works across several channels at once. In this space, marketers are looking at brand presence vs. experience. This maximizes efficiency with channel based performance. For instance, an ad may perform better than email with one piece of content and vice versa. While both relate to the brand, it’s altered to channel based performance vs. the storytelling.
The strategic advantage doesn’t end with these three definitions. Mixing and matching what someone sees at specific times by unification or diversity is the foundational key to getting multiple channels to work together and to create the experience the audience wants. Experimenting with audience, content, and optimization tactics will help your brand to find the perfect mix of unified experiences vs. channel diversity.
Understanding your customer is the first and last measurement to success as a business. As soon as the sale becomes about the product or service, you lose insight to what your customer needs from you as a promising brand.
It’s the relationship from brand to audience that is the center of experiences and defining what a prospect wants.
No matter what channel you work in, it’s the customer lifecycle that determines the right message to send. Every footprint on the journey someone has with your brand is specific to the experience they receive.
If someone is in the paid channel and they are introduced to your brand, omnichannel views say this awareness level should carry through to email and specific steps. As soon as the digital footprint changes, so does the needed experience. The integrated experience checks the boxes of channels by incorporating experience by lifecycle stage.
The optimization you build becomes reflective of audience first as your measurement. Engagement and conversion by stage highlights exactly how to target and message based on experience instead of channel performance.
When you first start building by experience instead of channel, you will want to measure results. This way you can test and optimize, giving insight into unique messaging being used vs. using the same message across all channels. Messages you send need to showcase engagement and purchase behavior that is consistent across all channels.
To measure coordination of channels, you will want to set up an attribution model. This determines what touchpoints drive conversion and which areas need to be optimized. The general rule is to assign value to each channel that is within the same message, specifically to see impact by value. The larger business decision to make is to determine how to measure each channel against each other, allowing the model to drive insight and results.
This tells the story from the first touch point someone had. If someone sees a paid ad and then takes further action, the paid ad will receive credit for the final attribution. This particular model works best with awareness lifecycle models, specifically to see what attracts someone to convert and what messaging works best. However, if you are running full funnel programs with email, this model will have less insight into performance.
Reversed from first-touch, this attribution model gives all the credit to the final interaction. Whichever channel led to a purchase is the one that is seen as the most impactful. This particular model works best for those that are “returning” or already have brand familiarity, dependent on audience interactivity and behavior between channels.
These two models use a mix of first and last touch points to see how different layers of the journey are impacted by someone’s decision making behavior. In these measurements, there is a blend of when someone purchases by stage they are in as well as what channels were used most impactfully to make that decision.
In this model, you will measure against every interaction and every touchpoint. The emphasis of this measurement is highlighted with the total customer experience. A customer sees you on a paid TikTok ad. They go to the site. They sign up for email and SMS. They get 3 emails and 2 SMS over a period of 7 days. They see the ad again. Then they see it again on Meta. This convinces them they need to purchase. In linear attribution, every channel that participated receives equal value for the final purchase made.
In linear attribution, the audience can take 30 days or 1 year to make a purchase. The distribution value will be the same. With time decay, frequency of interaction over time becomes integral. If a prospect takes 3 weeks to close, it has more attribution weight than someone who takes 6 weeks. Even though more messages are sent, the value lessens because of the time it took to close.
To find your model, look at the results you are looking at first and what you are trying to optimize for. If you are more interested in the awareness vs. consideration phases, it will change how you measure. To look at multi-channel vs. omnichannel versions of messaging, you will want to dig deeper into the way you measure success.
Deciding how to play with channels is the first layer of efficiency with experiences. Building across channels works more effectively in some instances, while others require the unique spin that channels have to offer.
These can be weighed through measurements as well as integrating the full lifecycle experience to pull leads into conversions. Thinking of integrated marketing as funnel experiences supports different models of the playbook you want to build for your next launch.
If you have been in multi-channel experiences but need to re-look how things work, dissecting stage by stage can help. Take these quick tips to move your awareness stage into an integrated experience:
1. Dissect Your Measurements. Metrics past the attribution model can be your microscope to find best results. Consider pulling out metrics related to sessions and purchase so you can identify how long it takes someone to engage. This includes anyone who is new (not returning), as well as frequency of interactivity. This percentage tells you where the gaps are.
2. Break out the experience. Look at ads that happen in the awareness stage and how many sessions this leads to on site. Take this and break it out to how long someone stays on site and what they do. What are they interested in? Further dissect this by examining the entry point to move into your email and what percentage by channel is making it through to the next stages. Included in the experience is how many emails and how much activity it takes before visiting the site again.
3. Optimization. The measurements at each digital footprint level also tells you what someone needs to see or receive to take the next steps. You can test against your current ads or emails to see what experiences the audience finds is more effective. For instance, if the first touch point of an ad is different than the first touch point of email, how does it impact results if it’s the same? Combine your messaging to measure performance of both versions to see whether touchpoints should differ.
This first layer of integration can point you to the overall direction you want to move in while further understanding the full blueprint and lifecycle of your customer.
Often times, brands get a user to purchase, say thank you and then leave. However, sustaining a brand is just as important as acquiring new users. Getting purchasers to remain loyal is another way to play with those that are interested in continuation of your brand.
1. Measure your RFM. There are two important metrics in the post purchase experience. The LTV (customer lifetime value) of how much someone purchases over time gives you a broader metric of each purchase. Combine this with RFM (how often do they repurchase and what is the monetization value) to understand how to work with messaging at the right time across different channels.
2. Build out the post purchase journey. A loyalty loop to build activity and to reactivate your purchases can help to increase the loyalty that you want for your brand.
3. Right Messaging Initiatives. Brands will usually measure someone who is inactive after a period of time as someone who has lapsed. However, there are key moments to create an experience that works for them. Understand when the right time to right message happens so you can showcase a proactive brand. For instance, if you know the average time for someone to lapse on a subscription is 6 months, then ramp up the messaging by all channels in month 5. You’ll trigger a positive response and more loyalty through your lapsed net while increasing your average lifetime value.
It’s not FOMO or experience based spending when our integrated marketing services refer to experience. Like everything, the way you message and align with your messages through each channel is a part of the integrated experience. As you continue to integrate with every channel and optimize toward performance, it will help to build a scalable brand that continues to grow with a unified presence online.
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