How Startups Can Use AI To Build Cross-Platform Growth Strategies

Everyone reading this has been told or has told someone that a cross-platform strategy is critical for brand visibility, recall, and, ultimately, sales. Yet, marketers worldwide will nod in agreement when I say implementing an effective cross-platform strategy is easier said than done. 

That is until artificial intelligence (AI) became easily accessible and understandable. 

Cross-Platform Marketing Strategy Is Of Absolute Importance

Today, there are myriad marketing channels and innumerable ways to get your brand in front of your target audience. Audiences are typically present across multiple channels and frequently switch between them a dozen times per day. This customer behaviour has already been recognised as a goldmine of an opportunity for brands to make it to the top of their customer’s minds and stay there. 

Companies that have strong cross-channel customer engagement see 89% of their customers return for more (compared to 33% for companies that have weak cross-channel customer engagement). Add to this the discovery that about 90% of customers expect consistent interactions with a brand, regardless of channel, and it becomes abundantly clear that cross-platform marketing is a must-do. 

So, what exactly is preventing brands from implementing cross-platform strategies?

Critical Challenges To Overcome

The biggest challenge we see today is not a lack of data, but rather a sense of being overwhelmed by the data that brands already have. For every channel or customer touchpoint that a brand invests in, there exists an application to collect the details of the interaction. Now imagine the multiple channels and touchpoints a brand sets up, and juxtapose that with the software collecting that information.

It simply means that marketers must manage an enormous tech stack overload, access to enormous amounts of data scattered across this stack, and a number of highly qualified marketers spending hours on each tool trying to make sense of the data. Due to this, analysis and insights generation has become increasingly complex and time-consuming, negatively impacting the Returns on Marketing Investments (ROMI).

In addition, performance evaluation across platforms is restricted due to the walled-garden approach that major social platforms currently follow. This makes it difficult for marketers to obtain an accurate picture of cross-platform performance.

Overcoming These Challenges With Artificial Intelligence

We’ve already seen that AI has helped marketers achieve nearly a  451% increase in qualified leads. This is a shining example of the efficiency and agility that AI brings to business growth. It has a direct impact on bottom-line revenue and shakes things up, which helps to improve ROMI. This raises the question of how precisely that could occur. 

There are, of course, many AI-led technologies available today. For cross-platform strategies to work, it’s crucial to collect and analyse all the scattered data retrieved from multiple customer touchpoints. 

AI can even solve the walled-garden problem to some extent because it has cohort-level data that can be extrapolated across platforms in minutes. This enables marketers to craft a strategy that is

• Sharply targeted based on cohort-level insights about the audience’s media usage
• Consistent in its messaging to avoid haranguing customers with the same message across all channels, or worse, reaching the wrong audience
• Monitored 24/7 to optimise based on engagements to avoid wasting dollars on inaction 

With AI governing this process, it becomes easy to intervene swiftly and communicate contextually, leaving marketing professionals to spend all their time strategizing for the brand’s next move.

Advantages Of An AI-Led Cross-Platform Strategy  

Artificial intelligence addresses some persistent issues that impede an effective cross-platform strategy, such as limited visibility of performance and siloed data plus analysis. With a self-evolving AI infrastructure, the technology constantly learns from every interaction, correlates it with past interactions, and then acts intelligently to bring a brand closer to achieving its targets. 

A good AI infrastructure solves the problem of scattered data by enabling hassle-free integrations with a whole host of tools marketers use. This allows AI systems to learn and cross-reference data for the same business goals, resulting in unified insights generation for marketers. All of this is made possible without requiring access to Personally Identifiable Information (PII). 

At the end of the day, brands can report an increase in quality customer interactions and brand visibility with robust AI-led cross-platform strategies. The most significant benefit is the elimination of audience duplication across platforms, which reduces marketing spend waste. Ultimately, AI not only enables a robust cross-platform strategy but also leads to delivering improved returns on media investments while quickly achieving business goals. 

With AI, marketers stand to gain the most in every way. They pave the way for their peers to adopt AI, the quality of their professional lives improves with AI doing the non-strategy heavy lifting, and, most importantly, they rapidly scale experimentation to help their businesses stretch marketing dollars to the zenith.

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