Cross-Platform Marketing Guide: Unified Strategy for 2025

I was staring at five different dashboards, each telling me a different story about the same user.

Facebook said they'd never seen our ad. Google Analytics said they'd visited our website three times. Our app showed they'd installed yesterday. Our email platform said they'd been a subscriber for six months. And our CTV vendor was taking credit for the conversion that happened on mobile.

One user. Five platforms. Zero understanding of what actually happened.

That was the moment I realized our "multi-channel strategy" was actually a multi-channel disaster.

The Epiphany That Changed How I Think About Marketing

I used to manage channels in silos. Mobile team over here. Web team over there. Social team in that corner. Email team somewhere else entirely. Each team optimizing their own metrics, hitting their own KPIs, celebrating their own wins.

Then I started interviewing our customers. What I heard changed everything.

"Yeah, I saw your ad on TV last month. Then I googled you on my phone but got distracted. Later I saw a Facebook ad and clicked through. Browsed your website on my laptop at work. Finally bought through your app on my couch last night."

Seven touchpoints across four devices over three weeks. And our attribution model was giving 100% credit to the last click—a retargeting ad that wouldn't have existed without the six touchpoints before it.

We weren't running a marketing strategy. We were running five separate strategies that occasionally bumped into each other by accident.

The Customer Journey I Finally Learned to See

Let me walk you through what a real journey looks like for our best customers:

8:00 PM: Watching streaming TV, sees our brand ad. Doesn't act, but registers the message subconsciously.

Next morning: Googles us on their phone during their commute. Lands on our mobile site. Browses for 3 minutes. Gets off the train.

Lunch break: Sees our retargeting ad on Instagram. Clicks through, explores more. Gets pulled into a meeting.

That evening: Opens their laptop at home. Searches for us directly. Browses our desktop site. Reads reviews. Adds to cart. Gets distracted by dinner.

Next day: Receives our abandoned cart email. Downloads our app. Completes purchase with a 10% first-purchase discount.

Every single platform played a role. But for years, only the email and app teams got credit. The CTV team, Google team, and social team were fighting for budget with metrics that looked terrible—because they were measuring the wrong thing.

How We Finally Built Something That Works

Mobile: Where Conversions Actually Happen

Our app is where 73% of purchases complete. But almost nobody discovers us in the app store. Mobile is our conversion engine, not our awareness engine. We optimized accordingly:

• App install campaigns targeting users who've already touched other channels
• Push notifications timed to when users are most likely to buy
• Deep links from every other platform, dropping users exactly where they need to be

Web: The Research Phase

Desktop and mobile web is where people do their homework. They compare, read reviews, check prices, think about it overnight. We stopped expecting web to convert directly and started expecting it to inform:

• SEO content answering every question they might have
• Retargeting pixels everywhere to keep the conversation going
• Smart app banners at the right moment—not immediately, but after engagement signals

Connected TV: The Awareness Catalyst

CTV looked terrible in last-click attribution. Zero direct conversions. But when we ran incrementality tests, we discovered CTV exposure increased overall conversion rates by 34%. It was working—just not in a way our dashboards could see:

• Brand storytelling that plants seeds for later
• QR codes for the "I want this now" crowd
• Household-level targeting that we can match to mobile devices later

Social: Community and Proof

Social isn't just an ad platform. It's where people check if you're legitimate:

• Organic content that builds trust over time
• User-generated content that does our selling for us
• Influencer partnerships that reach audiences we can't buy our way into

Email: The Relationship Layer

Email is the only channel where users explicitly said "yes, talk to me." We treat it accordingly—not as a blast channel, but as a relationship:

• Lifecycle sequences that move people toward purchase at their own pace
• Personalization based on behavior across all platforms
• Re-engagement for users who've gone quiet

"We used to ask 'which channel drove the sale?' Now we ask 'how did these channels work together to earn the customer?' It's a completely different question—and it leads to completely different decisions."

The Data Infrastructure That Made It Possible

None of this works without unified data. We learned that the hard way—spending months building beautiful cross-platform strategies on top of fragmented data that made them impossible to execute.

What We Built

• Customer Data Platform: One profile per person, updated in real-time from every source. When someone visits our website, our email platform knows. When they open the app, our ad platforms know.
• Identity Resolution: Connecting anonymous website visitors to known email subscribers to app users. Same person, different contexts, unified view.
• Event Tracking: Consistent event names and properties across every platform. A "product view" means the same thing whether it happens on web, app, or through a deep link.

The Measurement Problem We Finally Solved

Last-click attribution nearly killed our CTV and upper-funnel investments. Multi-touch attribution was better but still missed the full picture. Here's what actually works:

The Three-Layer Approach

1. Multi-touch attribution for tactical optimization. Which creative is working? Which audiences are responding?
2. Media mix modeling for strategic allocation. How much should we spend on each channel overall?
3. Incrementality testing for truth. What's the actual lift from each channel, independent of attribution models?

The incrementality tests were humbling. Some channels we'd been cutting performed better than channels we'd been scaling. We'd been optimizing toward the wrong signal for years.

The Tactics That Actually Move Needles

Web-to-App: The Handoff That Matters Most

Getting users from web to app increases their lifetime value by 2.3x for us. But the handoff has to be seamless:

• Smart app banners that appear after engagement, not immediately
• Deferred deep links that preserve context through the install
• QR codes on desktop for the "I'll download later" crowd

CTV-to-Mobile: Bridging the Living Room Gap

Someone sees your ad on their TV. Their phone is in their hand. How do you connect those moments?

• QR codes that actually work (big, on screen long enough, clear value proposition)
• Second-screen retargeting based on household IP matching
• Search lift measurement to capture the "I'll google that later" behavior

What I'd Tell Myself Three Years Ago

1. Understand where your users actually are. Not where you wish they were, not where your competitors are—where YOUR users spend time. That's where you invest.
2. Prioritize ruthlessly. You can't be excellent everywhere. Pick three platforms to dominate before adding a fourth.
3. Fix your data first. Every week you operate with fragmented data is a week you're making decisions blind. It's not glamorous work, but it's the foundation everything else sits on.
4. Run incrementality tests quarterly. Your attribution model is lying to you—the only question is how much. Incrementality tests tell you the truth.
5. Break down the silos. If your mobile team and web team are optimizing for different goals, you don't have a strategy. You have a competition.

The Future Is Already Here

The platforms keep multiplying. Gaming environments. AR/VR headsets. In-car screens. Retail media networks. Podcast ads. The companies that win won't be the ones present on every platform—they'll be the ones who figure out how to tell a unified story across whichever platforms their customers actually use.

That story doesn't start with "which channels should we buy?" It starts with "how do our customers actually make decisions?" Everything else follows from that.

Those five dashboards I was staring at three years ago? We still have them. But now they all feed into one view. One customer. One journey. One strategy.

It took us way too long to figure that out. Don't make the same mistake.