What is Cross-screen Marketing?
Cross screen marketing, also known as multi screen marketing, is the digital marketing practice of synchronizing a comprehensive campaign across the different screens a user is likely to be interacting with while relaxing. As media and marketing professionals, how do you tap into the ever expanding landscape of multi-screen, multi-tasking, multi-engagement devices/screens that are ubiquitous in our world today? This question results in a domino effect evoking many more questions:
- How are we best equipped to deliver a brand’s message, value proposition and ultimately elicit conversion?
- How does the multi-screen environment change the marketing funnel?
- How do we utilize the various screens to effectively engage the fragmented consumer who simultaneously use these devices?
- How do we gauge the duplication of reaching the same users vs. gaining necessary reach into the right target that may not be downloading a mobile app but is a regular visitor to a website via their laptop?
Benefits of Cross Screen Marketing
Our target audiences are multi-tasking across devices. Even among those with just a television and computer (two screens), 52% of users report that it’s somewhat or very likely that they’re using another device while watching television. With each screen added to the mix, that percentage rises, 60% of smartphone users (3 screens) and 65% of tablet owners (4 screens) say that multi-device use is the norm while watching TV (source: eConsultancy, May 2012)
Planners must understand the impact that multi-screen usage is having on their clients’ brands as the stats derived by recent studies highlight the importance of creating a multi-screens strategy:
- According to a report conducted by Videology, a video advertising technology, brands who implement multi-screen marketing experience 9x brand lift
- An eMarketer study of TV and online video found brands achieve a 7% reach increase when adhering to a multi-screen approach
- A co-authored study with Google and Nielson found multi-screen users have 17% more ad recall
Marketing in a Multi Screen World: What to Consider
Time of Day
Whether it’s a TV ad to launch to increase awareness followed by that person searching for more info on their work desktop, then targeted by a location based incentive on mobile or longer brand engagement via a tablet in the evening, day parting is key to making this a continuum of messaging not just singular efforts.
Consumption Habits
We need to understand the consumption habits of our audience in order to maximize how we weight each channel in the overall media mix, so we can reach them in the right place at the right time.
We should take advantage of what these different screens and their particular experience ‘opportunities’? offer. When developing a media strategy, marketers need to consider all screens, what their audience consumes on each screen and when the audience consumes the content. The era of the connected consumer has just begun. To succeed, marketers must adapt media planning and buying strategies to fit the needs of the multi-tasking mavens.
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