[News brief] the 7 cross-channel challenges faced by multi-enterprise businesses and franchises

Published on 20 September 2017

Marketing-Business Solutions-Generix Group
written_by_generix
Written
by
Generix Group
Categories
E-commerce
Omnichannel
B2B Collaboration

When it comes to a multi-enterprise business, the main challenge in sales and marketing is to deliver consistently coherent and centralized messages, while at the same time leveraging initiatives on a local and global level within a brand or the entire company ecosystem.
 

In addition to these complications, the emergence of cross-channel solutions has added further complexity to the game, and brands have to find a solution to managing all of the contact points and customer data in an accessible and homogenous fashion. To address this, we have come up with the 7 main cross-channel challenges that are faced by multi-enterprise businesses and franchises.

Defining cross-brand marketing objectives and fundamentals

The first challenge, before anything, is to define company-wide target objectives in terms of customer experience. What is the most important business objective? Is it consistent customer satisfaction, loyalty, additional or recurring sales, or a little bit of everything? A company must also define the common tools that will be used across local brands and as well as company-wide. All brands must be depicted equally to ensure that everyone’s needs are represented accurately.

 

Defining the marketing specificities of each entity

Once the strategies have been centralized it is then important to identify the individual strengths of each brand or local store, mainly because they are always going to be different from each other. This identification can be performed by the tools determined in the first challenge, and will be able to pinpoint strengths such as location specificity or consumer proximity, which will help define the marketing strategy even further.

 

Organizing and establishing marketing and decisional process priorities

Structure of the interactions within the group is of utmost importance, as it will ensure that the marketing strategies are implemented correctly in all areas of the company. The implementation must be fully organized, accessible, and fluid in order to simplify the process rather than add more complication to the mix.

 

Defining and implementing customer and product details filing rules

While there must be a cohesive strategy defined for the group in general, using the collaborative platform, each area must be able to interact autonomously within the system. This will allow for certain brand-specific areas such as customer bases and product reference systems to remain separate. The implemented tools must allow for these individual uses.

 

Managing marketing and commercial campaigns in a complex environment (multi-device and multi-enterprise)

It is very important to understand the complexity of managing multiple marketing and sales endeavors in a cross-channel and multi-enterprise market, and to use this complexity to one’s advantage. Communication, marketing, and commercial campaigns, even at a brand or local level, must always keep this complexity in mind, and individual endeavors should always be shared across the group.

 

Protecting access to sensitive data

Data access management is very important and should be implemented during the setup of any tools. Sensitive data, such as individual brand pricing, sales results, and any other material that must not be shared between entities, should be protected correctly with limited accessibility. Areas such as inter-competition and franchise independence should be adhered to when defining accessibility rules.

 

Measuring the efficiency of a centralized cross-channel solution or at individual enterprise levels

It is always important to be able to measure the efficiency and results of a centralized cross-channel solution. Areas of measurement should be defined upfront so that the performance of the process, tools and solution can be evaluated at any given time or point. The process as a whole should be evaluated as well as individual entities within the process itself.
 

When looking for a solution to manage a multi-channel and multi-entity business, it is important to look for a centralized approach that can be adapted according to each individual entity. This should allow for company-wide data to be processed and shared, while letting brands within the company maintain their independence.