This “Outside Consultant” column by Opus College of Business Marketing Professor Gino Giovannelli ran in the Star Tribune on May 3, 2021.
The answer is yes and yes. Conventional wisdom would suggest companies hire specialists in each of the digital marketing channels (website, display advertising, search, email, social and mobile), especially given how quickly these channels evolve in terms of how they can be used in the marketplace. However, while this approach allows specialists to focus the opportunities within a channel, it does little to help companies hoping to take advantage of opportunities that run across digital channels (both from an omnichannel and multichannel perspective). The natural tendency is for channel specialists to focus exclusively on how to engage users of “their channel” on “their channel,” and miss out on how to engage the users of “other channels” on “their channel.” For example, social media managers focus on creating compelling posts that only reach their social media followers (and typically only a small percentage of them). So, what if that same social media manager wants to extend the reach of those same compelling posts to people who have interacted with the brand, but just never officially chose to be follow the brand on social media?
That’s where thinking cross-channel opens doors. For example, social media platforms allow marketers to push social posts to “custom audiences,” which are groups of people who have interacted with your brand, but who are not necessarily social media followers of your brand. Custom audiences can be made up of people who have subscribed to your email marketing program, or people who have been to your website recently, or who have purchased your product online or offline, or have recently downloaded your app. All of this is possible, yet often not taken advantage of, because it requires channels specialists to think more holistically and work more collaboratively, which can be hard to do when focused exclusively on a channel.
To fully take advantage of all that digital marketing has to offer, we need a combination of digital marketing specialists who can stay current with all the opportunities within a channel, and digital marketing generalists to help see the opportunities across the channels.
Gino Giovannelli is a marketing professor at the University of St Thomas Opus College of Business and is co-host of the podcast series “In the Key of D – using DIGITAL to transform your business.”
