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Jimmy Rodriguez

Multichannel marketing helps brands achieve marketing goals by using multiple channels to reach out to customers. These channels range from traditional media such as TV, print ads and billboards to newer ones such as email marketing, social media and SEO.

According to MediaPost, two-thirds of customers use three or more channels when doing their research before purchase. In addition, customers who use more than one channel have a higher customer lifetime value (CLV) than those who don’t. Simply put, customers who have done the research and chose your company generally spend more and stick around longer.

Surprisingly, while 93% of marketers know that multichannel marketing is a key cog in the wheel, only 73% have a multichannel strategy in place. It seems some marketers don’t know how to get started.

5 Steps to Get Started

If you’re among the 27% of marketers who don’t have a multichannel strategy, here are five proven steps to get you started.

• Identify your customer persona. The first step to developing a fitting multichannel marketing strategy is to know your prospective buyer in detail, and the way to do that is by developing buyer personas.

Buyer personas are semifictional representations of your customers based on research. They usually cover your buyer’s background, interests, demographics, goals and pain points. With that information, you can tailor your campaigns to reach your prospective buyers through their most-used channels.

For instance, identifying your customer persona’s preferred websites and publications will give you a good idea of the channels where you can place your ads. Knowing their personality traits will also help you create content that speaks to your audience.

Creating a buyer persona may seem daunting, but tools such as HubSpot’s Make My Persona tool make the process a breeze. Spending time on this as an understanding of your audience is critical to the success of your marketing campaign.

• Zero in on the channels you want to use. With new media popping up every so often, the channels available for your business are endless. You can use industry websites or social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. LinkedIn and Facebook, in particular, are effective channels as you can join industry groups and use ads to target specific audiences based on their demographics and user behavior.

You may also use a combination of content and email marketing to push your leads down the sales funnel. For example, you can offer a free case study or white paper in exchange for a site visitor’s email address.

Once you’ve added a user to your mailing list, you can then send email newsletters to gradually convince your prospect that your business knows how to solve their problems. Once you’ve established your business as a credible source of information, you may then offer your product or service as a solution.

• Craft winning content. Don’t be eager to create content for your customer persona. It’s a good rule of thumb to strategize your content creation process to ensure that it resonates better with your audience and promotes your business purpose.

One of the best ways you can do that is to join the communities where they’re active. For example, you can join Facebook or LinkedIn groups for specific industries. Writing in a language that is local to your customers will help you to connect with them easily. If your target audience consists of managed service providers, use language and situations that are familiar to them.

Also, create blog posts, e-book, infographics, videos, pillar pages, and other forms of content tailored for your persona. Ensure that your content is …

Karen Thomas-Bland is a global board-level adviser, partner level management consultant and non-executive director. She has significant transformational, successful M&A experience, including in the tech sector.

Karen Thomas-Bland

She says there are five big integration challenges for technology acquirers.

Check out our slideshow above for the five big challenges to successful M&A in the tech sector.

Karen Thomas-Bland is a global board-level adviser, partner level management consultant and non-executive director. She has significant transformational, successful M&A experience, including in the tech sector.

Karen Thomas-Bland

She says there are five big integration challenges for technology acquirers.

Check out our slideshow above for the five big challenges to successful M&A in the tech sector.

Karen Thomas-Bland is a global board-level adviser, partner level management consultant and non-executive director. She has significant transformational, successful M&A experience, including in the tech sector.

Karen Thomas-Bland

She says there are five big integration challenges for technology acquirers.

Check out our slideshow above for the five big challenges to successful M&A in the tech sector.

Karen Thomas-Bland is a global board-level adviser, partner level management consultant and non-executive director. She has significant transformational, successful M&A experience, including in the tech sector.

Karen Thomas-Bland

She says there are five big integration challenges for technology acquirers.

Check out our slideshow above for the five big challenges to successful M&A in the tech sector.

Karen Thomas-Bland is a global board-level adviser, partner level management consultant and non-executive director. She has significant transformational, successful M&A experience, including in the tech sector.

Karen Thomas-Bland

She says there are five big integration challenges for technology acquirers.

Check out our slideshow above for the five big challenges to successful M&A in the tech sector.

Karen Thomas-Bland is a global board-level adviser, partner level management consultant and non-executive director. She has significant transformational, successful M&A experience, including in the tech sector.

Karen Thomas-Bland

She says there are five big integration challenges for technology acquirers.

Check out our slideshow above for the five big challenges to successful M&A in the tech sector.

Karen Thomas-Bland is a global board-level adviser, partner level management consultant and non-executive director. She has significant transformational, successful M&A experience, including in the tech sector.

Karen Thomas-Bland

She says there are five big integration challenges for technology acquirers.

Check out our slideshow above for the five big challenges to successful M&A in the tech sector.

Karen Thomas-Bland is a global board-level adviser, partner level management consultant and non-executive director. She has significant transformational, successful M&A experience, including in the tech sector.

Karen Thomas-Bland

She says there are five big integration challenges for technology acquirers.

Check out our slideshow above for the five big challenges to successful M&A in the tech sector.

Email security is a top concern among organizations. That’s because email remains a primary means for hackers to launch ransomware and initiate data breaches.

A Hornetsecurity survey of more than 420 businesses found about one in four (23%) reported an email-related security breach. Phishing attacks caused 36% of these breaches. These targeted what’s arguably the weakest point of any security system — end users.

Our latest CF List focuses on email security. Analysts with Omdia, S&P Global Market Intelligence and Forrester weighed in on email security market trends and what it takes to be a successful provider.

Customers Want Better Protection

Joseph Blankenship is vice president and research director of security and risk at Forrester. He said the pandemic hasn’t had a direct impact on the expectations of an email security solution. What has changed is that customers are looking for better protection against phishing and business email compromise (BEC) attacks.

Forrester’s Joseph Blankenship

“The most effective solutions combine capabilities like email filtering, anti-malware, authentication, security awareness and training, phishing protection, and incident response capabilities — either in an integrated suite or through partnerships/integrations,” he said. “Email is also becoming an important part of extended detection and response (XDR), and we are seeing integrations with endpoint technologies as part of this.”

Scott Crawford is research director of information security at S&P Global Market Intelligence.

S&P Global Market Intelligence’s Scott Crawford

“Email is still one of – if not the most prevalent – means for an adversary attempting to gain a foothold in a targeted organization,” he said. “That remains true for any number of reasons. It’s simple and accessible. It requires a certain set of tactics that are fairly easy to reproduce at scale. To the extent that it relies on social engineering, people can be manipulated, and that’s one of the main things about email. It’s a primary interface between the external world, people and technology within a targeted organization. That’s a trifecta that’s really tough to beat in any other venue. So email will continue to be a popular threat vector regardless.”

Adversaries Becoming More Creative

One of the biggest trends over the last couple of years is as adversaries become more creative with their tools and techniques to target potential victims via email, the technologies they’re using have advanced accordingly, Crawford said.

“So we see a cadre of email security vendors that are seeking to push the envelope, if you will, pushing into new frontiers of what they’re actually looking for in malicious email,” he said. “They’re leading really in terms of technology innovation for recognizing these attacks and mitigating them. So that’s been probably one of the most significant things that we’ve seen over the last couple of years. That and some increased interest in sender authentication and validation.”

There’s also been some overlapping of email security and zero trust initiatives as “they do tend to have a lot in common,” Crawford said.

Rik Turner is principal analyst at Omdia, which shares a parent company with Channel Futures (Informa). He said the migration of corporate email services to the cloud has had various consequences on email security:

• It meant all the secure email gateway (SEG) providers had to develop cloud-delivered SaaS services for their products.
• It also brought Microsoft into the email security market, if not as a full-blown competitor, then as a provider of “good enough” protection against malware, spam and spyware, with its Exchange Online Protection (EOP) product. Microsoft doesn’t offer EOP as a standalone, so it isn’t in direct competition with SEGs. Furthermore, it continues to work with any SEG that is deployed in front of Office 365. But clearly EOP is a factor in whether or not a customer continues to renew its subscription with its SEG provider.

Changing Threat Landscape Spawns New Generation

The threat landscape at least partially is moving on from traditional malware, spam and spyware to email attack methodologies like phishing, BEC and executive fraud, Turner said.

This in turn has spawned a new generation of email security providers, dubbed non-SEGs, whose technology:

• Isn’t deployed in front of Office 365, but instead integrates with it or Gmail via API.
• It’s not a “one-time” look at the mail flow. It’s able to go back and pull an email even after it has already been delivered to an inbox if it has subsequently been discovered to be malicious.

SEG Market Growing

Omdia’s Rik Turner

The market for SEG technology is still growing, Turner said. Omdia has it at $1.6 billion in 2020 and growing to $2 billion in 2024, “so enterprises are clearly not ready to ditch their SEG wholesale in favor of EOP, at least not right now.”

“Beyond an SEG, you clearly need the capabilities of a non-SEG to address the more modern attack methodologies,” he said. “And whether you opt to get them from your existing SEG provider or go with one of the new kids on the block probably depends on how much you trust/like the former, your appetite for risk, and your ability and readiness to manage a second email security product in addition to your SEG. It obviously should be simpler to get the whole thing from one vendor. But maybe you’re already halfway toward easing the incumbent out, wondering whether Microsoft EOP might be able to do a good enough job on the basics, and so considering a much cheaper product from one of the pureplay non-SEG guys.”

We’ve compiled a list, in alphabetical order, of 20 top email security providers. It’s based on analysts’ feedback and recent news reports. The list, by no means complete, includes a mix of well-known providers as well as lesser-known ones making strides in email security.