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As the online advertising landscape becomes increasingly fragmented, omnichannel marketing is more important than ever. When implemented strategically, it can help you connect with customers in the ways they want to be reached. It’s important to know what’s involved with omnichannel marketing, what its core principles are, and how you can benefit from an omnichannel marketing campaign.
Understanding Omnichannel Marketing
What is Omnichannel Marketing and What Are Its Key Characteristics?
Omnichannel marketing is defined by marketing that cohesively exists across all possible channels and meets the customer at every stage of the funnel. The core principle and goal of an omnichannel approach is to create a seamless customer experience across every touchpoint and channel, including websites, apps, physical stores, and every other place a customer might see or hear an ad.
Key elements include consistency, convenience (offering the customer a chance to engage, no matter where they are), personalization (done through gathering data across the customer journey), and a sense of where the customer is now in their buying journey. This is why you might put something in an online cart but not buy it, and then see an ad for that same product the next day.
Omnichannel marketing approaches the customer from all angles and tries to encourage them to move down the marketing funnel. It’s becoming increasingly more important for businesses as customers engage with media in so many forms and on so many platforms. There’s also the fact that if a brand’s competitors are on TikTok, Instagram, the digital kiosk at the market, the print newspaper, and everything in between, that brand better be there as well.
How Does Omnichannel Marketing Differ From Multichannel Marketing?
While, theoretically, it could be as simple as the difference between omni (all) and multi (many), the meaning goes deeper than that. Omnichannel is about bringing the customer a unified experience across all touchpoints, whereas multichannel aims to promote the products across a variety of channels without a personalized integration. With a multichannel approach, a product might have a different voice or style for its website than, say, for a magazine ad. With omnichannel, the voice is unified and is designed to work with the brand’s messaging on other channels to keep customers engaged in the product’s world.
Benefits of Omnichannel Marketing
How Does Omnichannel Marketing Enhance the Customer Experience?
Omnichannel marketing enhances the customer experience by delivering consistent messaging across all channels, so the customer feels like they’re dealing with an actual entity, and not a random series of brands being thrown at them.
Can Omnichannel Marketing Drive Higher Conversion Rates and Sales?
Omnichannel marketing can drive higher conversion rates and sales by tracking consumer data across the customer journey. The strategy is largely informed by data, which can tell you how and when your consumers engage with brands. As the approach maintains consistent messaging and reaches the customer at multiple touchpoints, it promotes brand recognition, customer engagement, and loyalty.
The strategy gives marketers a more holistic view of the customer journey via mapping it along all touchpoints. It identifies where customers interact with a brand, analyzes the data to see where friction occurs, and then develops plans to work through the challenges, and land a conversion.
Key Components of an Omnichannel Strategy
What Are the Different Channels That Can Be Integrated in an Omnichannel Approach?
The different channels that can be integrated in an omnichannel approach include SMS messages, radio and podcast ads, video ads, display ads, in-store displays, in-store and outdoor interactive kiosks, social media ads, and email marketing newsletters.
How Do You Ensure Seamless Transitions Between Different Touchpoints?
You can ensure seamless transitions between different touchpoints by employing consistent messaging that makes it feel like the brand is a dependable source, no matter how or where the consumer encounters it. One way to maintain consistent branding and messaging across all channels is to create a style guide that includes certain words and phrases, as well as graphics, fonts, colors, and other aspects of visual presentation.
Maintain clear and firm rules about how you speak to your target audience, whether as a trusted friend or something more formal. Decide whether your voice is humorous, serious, or a combination of both. As you work out the nuances and create a clear voice, it will become easier to maintain a consistent tone when launching your omnichannel campaigns.
Make sure to save and analyze consumer interactions along the way, so that you have a sense of their behavioral history and you can see where they might have lost or gained interest. You can also set up your campaign touchpoints so that the consumer can engage with a brand on one platform and complete the purchase on another if necessary. This way, they can buy whenever the mood hits, and not just when they happen to be on one particular channel or device.
How Important Is Personalization in an Omnichannel Strategy?
Personalization is very important in an omnichannel strategy (and, indeed, in any marketing strategy). It’s also easier than ever before, given the amount of data marketers can collect using the various technologies available to not only gather data, but organize it, and in some cases suggest a next move. Nearly 75% of consumers say they are more likely to buy from brands that deliver personalized experiences, and they spend 37% more with those brands, according to a recent study from Deloitte. Since an omnichannel strategy is based on reaching the consumer through as many avenues as possible and basing interactions on previous behavior, it offers a particularly good opportunity to achieve a high level of personalization.
Implementing an Omnichannel Approach
What Are the Initial Steps Involved in Developing an Omnichannel Strategy?
To get started with developing an omnichannel strategy, you’ll want to map the customer journey, define how you will measure success (ROI, certain KPIs, etc.), create a unified customer data strategy with easily accessible data, arrange a flexible tech stack to support your personalization strategy, and be prepared to keep testing and iterating.
How Do You Map the Customer Journey and Identify Key Touchpoints?
In order to map the customer journey, find out what channels your customers use, where they are likely to find your brand, where they either stop without making a purchase, or where they decide to make a purchase. You can experiment by offering personalized discounts for people who abandon their carts or are returning after an absence of shopping.
You want to get clear about your business goals and which metrics are most important to you in determining whether your campaign is a success. Create a data strategy that will give you a full view of the customer, so you can track their interactions across various touchpoints with your brand’s messaging across the channels. As you get to know your customer, you might prioritize different channels and types of messaging over time.
How to Measure the Success and ROI of Your Omnichannel Efforts?
You’ll want to take a few key things into account when measuring the success and ROI of your omnichannel efforts. For example, you can track key performance indicators like conversion rates, cross-channel engagement, customer lifetime value, customer retention, customer acquisition costs, and return on ad spend. Pay attention to which areas of your campaign drive conversions and engagement (revenue attribution), and how much your campaign has earned versus how much you’re spending. You can look at the campaign as a holistic experience and then break down where you’re seeing positive movement.
In order to do this, make sure your tech stack is giving you what you’ll need. A good mix includes: cross-channel analytics to track customer behavior across the platforms; a customer relationship system to provide a holistic view of a customer’s history and enable personalization; customer data platforms to unify data from all touchpoints; and API integration for real-time data sharing across the platforms.
The silos that generally exist between sales and marketing can hamper productivity and campaign success, so it’s wise to break them down as much as possible. By fostering a collaborative culture where both sides share the same goal, utilize one unified source of data, and engage in open and easy communication, you’re more likely to get the teams to behave like one solid force, rather than separate entities.
Challenges and Best Practices
What Are Some Common Challenges in Implementing Omnichannel Marketing?
Some common challenges in implementing omnichannel marketing include maintaining brand voice and messaging throughout all channels, integrating data across all channels, dealing with outdated technologies that won’t support omnichannel marketing, handling attribution measurement issues, and ensuring you’re getting quality data that can help you make the right decisions.
What Are the Best Practices for Creating a Cohesive and Seamless Customer Experience?
In order to create a cohesive and seamless customer experience, you’ll need to make sure you can overcome data integration and channel management issues. You can do this by making sure your data isn’t siloed and is instead easily accessible to all departments. You can also connect your sales, marketing, and customer service teams so everyone has access to the same information when viewing customer behavior on your channels.
You’ll also want to agree on a specific brand message so your customer has a consistent experience no matter where they encounter your brand. One way to do that is to leverage customer data effectively, by paying attention to what resonates with your customer and what influences their engagement with your brand. From there, you can personalize your approach for specific situations. And, of course, you want to stay on top of emerging technologies (like AI) that can help you better track and plan for evolving customer behavior. As you get to know your customers, and as customers overall change their expectations and needs, you want to stay agile and open to changing your methodologies.
Key Takeaways
Omnichannel marketing is a necessary part of doing business in today’s marketing landscape, where consumers are encountering your brand on multiple different channels. By integrating various technologies and creating a consistent messaging plan across every touchpoint, marketers can reach consumers in highly effective ways that can encourage greater campaign success and ROI.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What are some examples of successful omnichannel marketing campaigns?
Starbucks has seen success with its loyalty rewards app as part of an omnichannel marketing approach. The app lets customers check their balances and reload their cards whether in-store, on a website, or on the app, with real-time updates across every platform.
Walgreens has also benefited from an omnichannel approach by allowing users to optimize their in-store experience via online choices. Customers can quickly fill out refill requests and place orders on their mobile device, and then pick up the item in a local store. While this might seem like a “digital first” experience, it ties in directly with making their in-store experience easier and more streamlined.
Is omnichannel marketing only for large businesses?
Omnichannel marketing is for businesses of all sizes. While larger companies might have the means to make implementation easier, smaller businesses have everything to gain from connecting with the consumer across every possible channel.
How much does it cost to implement an omnichannel strategy?
The cost of implementing an omnichannel strategy will vary from brand to brand, as it depends on how many channels and platforms a brand is seeking to integrate into its strategy, and how much data it is looking to collect and analyze. The more data and the more touchpoints, the higher the costs might be.
What is the future of omnichannel marketing?
The future of omnichannel marketing involves more personalized experiences and increased use of AI to analyze data and aid in marketers’ decision-making. Immersive experiences, such as augmented reality and virtual reality, will likely also increase as technologies develop and consumers crave new and innovative forms of engagement.
How do you train your team for an omnichannel approach?
In order to train a team when implementing an omnichannel approach, it’s important to develop clear and cohesive brand messaging and commit to deliver that across all platforms. You’ll also need to train the team to understand the different customer relationship management systems and various kinds of data they will encounter throughout the omnichannel campaign. The team will need to learn how to align with other departments on shared goals, and how to effectively understand consumer interaction across the various touchpoints on the way to conversion.
