Multichannel Advertising

How Companies Can Achieve More with Cross-Platform Campaigns

When someone buys a product or books a service, it’s extremely rare for them to have had just a single touchpoint with a brand. It might start with a video that pops up while they’re scrolling through their feed. Days later, they might do a Google search, followed by another interaction via a retargeting ad, and finally, they place an order. This sequence plays out in countless variations, across different devices, platforms, and time frames.

Multichannel advertising turns this reality into a strategy. Companies that coordinate their advertising channels guide potential buyers through the entire decision-making process, rather than focusing on a single moment. This article explains how such a strategy is structured, where the challenges lie, and what factors should guide a sensible choice of channels.

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Johanna Luding
June 22, 2026
June 22, 2026

In this article, you will learn:

What does "multichannel advertising" mean?

Why Multichannel Advertising Is Important for Businesses

Push and Pull: The Two Basic Mechanisms in Multichannel Advertising

The Funnel as the Foundation of a Multichannel Strategy

Which channel is right for which company?

The Challenges of Multichannel Advertising

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What does "multichannel advertising" mean?

Multichannel advertising refers to the coordinated use of multiple advertising channels within a single campaign strategy. Instead of concentrating the entire budget on a single platform, channels such as Google, Meta, LinkedIn, or TikTok are combined to reach target audiences at different stages of their purchasing decision.

The goal isn't to be everywhere. It's about using the right channels at the right time with the right message. Those who understand this difference make better decisions about budget allocation and channel selection.

Why Multichannel Advertising Is Important for Businesses

Multichannel advertising increases the number of relevant touchpoints with potential buyers, thereby reflecting how purchasing decisions actually come about: across multiple interactions, platforms, and time periods. A single channel covers only a small part of this customer journey. By combining multiple channels, businesses can be visible at more decision-making moments and gain greater independence from individual platforms.

Behind this logic lies a simple connection: Target audiences divide their attention among multiple platforms, and each platform serves a different purpose. The person scrolling through Instagram in the evening is the same person searching for a solution on Google the next morning. A company that captures only one of these moments may be leaving the other to the competition.

Then there’s the issue of resilience. Anyone who concentrates all their advertising efforts on a single platform is vulnerable to algorithm changes, rising click prices, or a loss of reach on that very platform. A diversified strategy reduces this risk and creates flexibility to shift budgets to where they’ll have the greatest impact right now.

Push and Pull: The Two Basic Mechanisms in Multichannel Advertising

Advertising channels can be distinguished based on whether they serve or generate demand. While pull marketing reaches people who are actively searching, push marketing targets individuals who aren’t searching but still belong to the relevant target audience. This distinction does not run between the networks, but rather across them. Meta, TikTok, and LinkedIn primarily use push marketing, while Google enables both: search campaigns serve active demand, whereas display, YouTube, and demand-gen campaigns generate it. Therefore, the starting point for planning is not the platform itself, but rather the question of what situation the target audience—which a campaign is intended to reach—is in.

Pull Marketing: Meeting Existing Demand

Pull channels reach people who are actively looking for something. The best-known form is search campaigns on Google or Microsoft, but the range of search queries is broad: transactional queries like “buy office chair” signal a concrete intent to purchase, while informational queries like “back pain at the office—what to do” mark the beginning of someone grappling with a problem. Both can be addressed with search ads, but they require different messages and possibly different landing pages.

The strength of pull lies in the fact that the need has already been articulated and ads can respond precisely to it. The limitation lies in volume: Pull campaigns can only tap into the demand that already exists. Anyone offering a product that requires explanation or is new, or operating in a market with low search volume, will quickly reach the limits of pull alone.

Push Marketing: Generating New Demand

Push channels reach people who aren’t actively searching. The ads appear in the social feed, before a YouTube video, or as a banner on a website. Targeting is based on interests, behavior, and demographic characteristics rather than a search query. Social platforms such as Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Pinterest primarily operate on this principle, each reaching a different audience.

The Google Network also offers a range of push formats: Display campaigns place banners on websites and apps; video campaigns on YouTube are among the most effective formats for building brand awareness; and demand generation campaigns serve visual ads.

It’s important to note that push notifications aren’t limited to reaching out to strangers. Through retargeting, push formats also reach people who have already had contact with the brand, thereby taking on tasks related to closing sales—such as reaching out again to users who abandoned their shopping carts with a specific offer.

How Push and Pull Complement Each Other

This synergy can be illustrated with a scenario: A company that sells ergonomic office furniture runs TikTok campaigns showing the product in everyday work settings. A user sees the video, doesn’t click on it, but remembers the brand. Two weeks later, with a sore back after long days at work, she searches Google for “ergonomic office chair review.” The company’s search ad appears; since the brand name is already familiar to her, she’s more likely to click, and a conversion follows.

Both mechanisms contributed to this purchase: “Push” sparked the demand, and “Pull” closed the deal. In addition, there are measurable synergies. “Push” campaigns build retargeting audiences and increase search volume for the brand itself: People who are already familiar with a brand are more likely to actively search for it, which increases the reach of “Pull” campaigns and can improve their conversion rates.

The Funnel as the Foundation of a Multichannel Strategy

A multichannel strategy follows the logic of the funnel: Different channels perform different tasks along the customer journey. Some generate awareness, others deepen interest, and still others trigger the purchase decision or re-engage existing customers.

Awareness: Building Visibility Among New Target Audiences

The awareness phase is about reaching people who are not yet familiar with the company or who are not yet aware that they have a need for a particular service or product.

This phase is dominated by high-reach channels with strong video capabilities: TikTok, Meta awareness campaigns, YouTube, and display networks. The primary goal of this phase is not direct conversion, but brand awareness. At the same time, this phase builds the data foundation for later phases, as the users reached become part of the retargeting audiences.

Consideration: Deepen Interest and Build Trust

In the consideration phase, potential buyers have already become aware of the brand. The goal now is to turn fleeting interest into genuine purchase intent. Meta campaigns with traffic or engagement goals can be effective here, but should be used with caution: Campaigns optimized for clicks reliably deliver clicks, but not necessarily qualified visitors. A more reliable approach is to optimize for deeper signals, such as shopping cart events or micro-conversions like newsletter sign-ups. Content plays a particularly central role in this phase: comparisons, explanatory videos, and customer reviews guide the decision-making process and build trust.

Conversion: Generating Sales

In the conversion phase, interest turns into action. Google Search is structurally very strong here because search queries signal an active intent to purchase. Retargeting campaigns on Meta that target abandoned cart users or returning website visitors with a specific offer also serve an important purpose. Campaigns in this phase should be consistently optimized for conversions—that is, purchases, inquiries, or sign-ups—rather than general reach, and should always direct users to thematically relevant landing pages.

Retention: Reaching Out to Existing Customers Again

The retention phase is often overlooked in many strategies, even though it’s significantly cheaper to reactivate existing customers than to acquire new ones. Customer lists can be saved on Meta and Google as separate target groups and used to deliver tailored messages: complementary products, repeat orders, new services. It makes sense here to clearly manage the frequency of these messages and coordinate with email marketing so that the same person doesn’t receive the same message across three channels at once. When set up correctly, this creates a cycle that increases the value of every customer relationship.

However, it’s important to always keep in mind that the funnel is a planning model, not a universal representation of reality. Actual customer journeys rarely follow a linear path; people jump between stages, do more research, abandon the process, and return weeks later. Nevertheless, the model remains valuable as a structural framework for defining roles, goals, and metrics for individual campaigns.

One way to address this complexity from a technical standpoint is through Performance Max within the Google Network: This campaign type automatically runs across all Google placements—from Search to YouTube and Display—thereby guiding users through multiple funnel stages within a single campaign. The trade-off for this automation is less manual control over placement and delivery, which places correspondingly higher demands on the quality of the conversion signals and creatives used.

Which channel is right for which company?

More channels don't automatically mean better results. Choosing the right platforms starts with an honest assessment:

Where does your target audience actually spend its time?

How long is your purchasing decision-making process?

What is the realistic budget, and how many resources are realistically available?

A few well-managed channels generally deliver better results than many channels that are run on budgets that are too small and without platform-specific creative content.

The target audience sets the direction here: A B2B company looking to reach decision-makers at medium-sized businesses will achieve different results on LinkedIn than on TikTok. A D2C fashion retailer with a young target audience, on the other hand, has a different starting point on TikTok and Instagram than it does with traditional display advertising, let alone ads on LinkedIn. Existing campaign data and an analysis of the target audience’s actual media usage provide the basis for this decision.

The product itself also influences the channel strategy. An impulse purchase of 20 euros benefits from a strong presence on high-reach platforms. A consulting service, on the other hand, involving a decision-making process that spans several months, requires consistent visibility over a longer period and channels that convey credibility and expertise. In B2B, there’s the added factor that the actual conversion often doesn’t occur until weeks after the first interaction with the brand, which places special demands on measurement.

In our consulting practice at Partner & Söhne criteria have proven effective for selecting the appropriate advertising channels:

Target audience: On which platforms is this audience actually active and reachable?

Product: Does the purchasing decision-making process align with how the channel operates?

Budget: Is it sufficient to provide each selected channel with enough data?

Resources: Can platform-specific creatives be produced and maintained?

Measurability: Can the channel's contribution to the overall result be tracked?

It often makes sense to start with one or just a few channels where reliable data can be collected. Additional channels are added gradually as soon as the results justify an expansion. The budget allocation is then based on actual results rather than on speculation about which channel might work.

Do you have any questions?

Multichannel advertising is only effective when strategy, channel selection, and measurement work together as an integrated system. We help you select the advertising channels that are right for your target audience and your product, allocate budgets effectively throughout the funnel, and set up campaigns so that each channel contributes to the overall result.

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The Challenges of Multichannel Advertising

Attribution: Which channel is credited with the conversion?

Attribution describes the process of assigning conversions to the touchpoints that contributed to a purchase decision. In a multichannel context, this quickly becomes complicated. Here’s an example: A person sees a TikTok ad but doesn’t click on it. Three days later, they search for the product on Google, click on a search ad, and make a purchase. Google Ads credits the conversion to itself based on last-click logic, and TikTok’s contribution remains invisible in the reporting.

It becomes even more confusing when multiple platforms claim credit for the same conversion. Meta can attribute it to itself via the view-through attribution window, while Google attributes it to the last click. Both attributions are technically correct according to their respective rules, but when added together, they exceed the actual number of sales. Tracking restrictions due to consent requirements and browser limitations further exacerbate this lack of clarity.

Reliable performance measurement therefore requires a nuanced analysis of the results and a clear understanding of the challenges and limitations of various attribution models. For larger budgets, incremental tests with control groups are the methodologically strongest approach because they show which conversions were actually driven by advertising. In any case, it remains important that channels should not be evaluated in isolation based on their own reporting metrics, but rather based on their contribution to the overall system.

Budget Allocation Across Channels

Budget allocation is one of the most critical decisions in a multichannel strategy. At the outset, there is often a lack of reliable data, which can lead to the temptation to distribute the budget evenly. It makes more sense to set clear priorities: first, build up the channel with the most direct connection to the business goal, then expand. Another common mistake is to focus the entire budget on conversion campaigns while neglecting the upper funnel stages, which are what generate the pipeline of users ready to make a purchase. Ultimately, the prioritization of different channels depends on the individual business model, the product, and the relevant target audience, and cannot be defined in a one-size-fits-all manner.

Consistency in Messaging and Creative Assets

Each platform has its own requirements in terms of format and tone. TikTok rewards content that looks native and doesn’t feel like an ad; LinkedIn requires a more professional tone; and Google Search needs text that aligns with the user’s search intent. The challenge lies in adapting image, video, and text assets to each platform while maintaining a recognizable brand message. This is a real resource issue that should be taken into account from the very beginning when planning the budget.