Cross Media Marketing: A Practical Guide

In recent years, there has been a dramatic shift in marketing practices. Once, it was best to focus on a single channel, but now, the concept of cross-media marketing has become commonplace. This change is still ongoing, and many advertisers may wonder, “what is cross-marketing?”

Read on to find out all about it, and discover how it can help your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns.

What is Cross Marketing?

Today, the leading advertising platforms are Google Ads and Facebook Ads. What many people don’t realize is that you don’t have to choose between them – you can run ads on both. Moreover, you can use them together to enhance your campaign.

Cross-media marketing offers you a broader scope in data analysis, as you can leverage data insights on one platform to make improvements on the other.

Which Platform to Start?

Whether you start your advertising on Facebook or Google first will depend on variables such as your industry, your products or services, and your specific campaign goals.

Let’s imagine you have a tech product, like a new smart home gadget. By kickstarting your campaign with Google Ads, you’re more likely to get your ad in search results because people are actively searching for tech solutions on Google.

By comparison, if you have something related to entertainment or fun, you may have more success by starting with Facebook Ads. Here, you can target specific interest groups to get people talking about your brand on social platforms.

Regardless of which route you opt for, it’s important to run the campaign for at least a week, preferably longer. This will allow the platform to collect enough data, which then gives you greater insights about audience engagement. When you do this with Google, you will have more information to work with when targeting people on Facebook Ads.

Start Running Your Google Ads Campaign

Let’s take a look at the process of cross-media marketing when we start a campaign on the Google Ads network first.

Here, you configure your campaign settings for your target audience, which involves setting specific parameters for important aspects, such as:

• Demographics, including age, gender, and income.
• Target locations from entire countries to specific cities or regions.
• Target keywords and keyword match types.
• Target languages if your audience speaks more than one.

A vital step is setting up a negative keywords list, which allows you to add irrelevant user search queries throughout your campaign. These terms act as filters, ensuring your ad is not triggered for irrelevant search queries. Therefore, you won’t incur a lot of wasted spends attracting useless clicks and unqualified users who will never convert.

Also, you must set the campaign goal. Defining your goals is crucial in any PPC advertising campaign, as it will guide your decision-making going forward.

For this example, we’ll set the goal as Leads to focus on lead generation and maximizing website visits.

Check the option for the Search and Display Network. This will give your ads the maximum amount of exposure, which is vital for lead generation.

Next, select the locations you will target.

If you know your audience already, you may be able to pinpoint more specific locations. If not, start by targeting a wider area. Over time, as you gather more data, you can refine the targeting by adding exclusions to reduce your targeting costs.

Set Up An Information Collecting Form

Data collection is a crucial component of cross-marketing. You must make sure your landing pages are equipped for the task by setting up a form on each one. When you optimize your landing pages and include a strong call-to-action, you can quickly build an email list of new leads.

After a few weeks, a well-optimized Google Ads campaign can gather a lot of leads, which you can then retarget with an email marketing campaign – or a Facebook Ads campaign.

It’s a good idea to keep your form short and simple. Overcomplicated forms easily deter people, so if you want to generate more leads, make it easy for people to complete the form.

Facebook Custom Audience Targeting

So, once you have gathered enough leads through the email form, you can move on to the next stage of your cross-media marketing campaign – Facebook Ads.

Get started by setting up your campaign in Facebook Ads Manager as follows:

Select the hamburger menu button in the Facebook Ads dashboard.

Select “Audiences”, which is under Assets in the dropdown menu.

Select “Create New Audience”.

Select “Customer List” from the options.

Next, select “Customer File” from the audience options list.

By using this method, you can upload files with Google Ads data on your current leads and customers, which paves the way for much stronger customer relationships. You can effectively connect with prospects at multiple stages of the buyer’s journey, engaging them across two platforms to offer a seamless user experience.
Another option here is to import leads from an email marketing tool, such as MailChimp.

If you don’t have that prepared, you can build a custom data file in either CSV or TXT format.

To do this, download the customer data file template, then upload the information you have about your leads.

That’s it!

Now, your new custom audience is ready for use in a Facebook Ads campaign. When you start advertising on Facebook, the platform will use the data you uploaded to show your ads to real users on Facebook.
Therefore, you can retarget many of your Google Ads’ leads on Facebook. This is a good idea as warm leads are more likely to re-engage your brand, which increases the chance of a conversion.

Cross Media Marketing is a Potent Brand-Building Technique

By using cross-media marketing, you can retarget previous site visitors, and drive more traffic back to your website. This not only increases brand awareness across two major advertising platforms, but it also improves your lead generation and conversion rates.

Over time, you can continue refining your audience targeting, and set up new audiences to use Facebook ads to nurture stronger ties with prospects. This consistent approach builds trust with people and helps you filter out leads that aren’t likely to convert.

Through it, all, remember that you should be trying to offer a solution, so your ad copy and headlines should target specific users. That will improve the quality of your leads for your cross-media campaign.