In order to provide a seamless and consistent customer experience, businesses have to integrate their marketing efforts across not just a few, but all channels. Today, we’ll explore the fundamentals of omnichannel marketing and the benefits of using it. We’ll also look at actionable strategies to help YOU create a successful omnichannel marketing campaign.
What Is Omnichannel Marketing?
Omnichannel marketing is an approach that focuses on creating a unified and integrated customer experience across multiple channels. These channels could be online, like your website, app, social posting, and email marketing; or offline, like a retail store, a billboard, or a physical event.
Unlike multichannel marketing, which simply involves using multiple disjointed channels to reach customers, omnichannel marketing aims to provide a connected experience throughout the customer journey, using all the channels a customer will encounter.
Why Is Omnichannel Essential?
The modern consumer doesn’t just walk into a store and make a purchase. Their buying journey might start online, where they research the product, then move to a physical store to see it in person, and conclude with a purchase made on a mobile app. At each interaction, they expect the brand to recognize them, remember their preferences, and offer them a smooth and unbroken customer journey.
This includes emails they receive from your brand, the posts they see you make on social media, and the digital ads they’re served on their phone. If you’re inconsistent, they’ll notice, and they’ll be less inclined to buy from you.
Omnichannel also allows you to reach more members of your audience. Different channels are better for reaching different people, so by covering all your bases, you maximize the opportunities for someone to see your products or services and interact with your brand.
Omnichannel Marketing Starts With The Right Data
To make omnichannel marketing work, you need to know where your audience is on every channel. While we’d recommend starting out with a list to get new customers, a solid CRM is your best bet to nurture consumers in your pipeline. With a CRM, you can keep track of each of your leads, prospects, and ongoing customers in one place.
By keeping tabs on your consumer base, you benefit in two major ways:
1) You can give each individual the experience they need
The position of each individual in your sales funnel determines which emails they should receive and which ads they should be served. It also determines how you should respond if they call your company or visit you in-store.
2) You can get a better understanding of your whole audience
From the get-go, you should have an understanding of your audience’s characteristics and problems. This will allow you to make every channel more effective, and continue to pull people toward your solution. It also allows you to anticipate customer needs, and answer them via your channels.
What Else Do You Need For Effective Omnichannel Marketing?
1) Strategy
The single most important thing before pulling the trigger on any campaign is a strategy. You need to lay out what you’re promoting, who you’re trying to reach, what you want to accomplish, and how you’re going to measure your success.
Maybe you want to focus on direct mail or on digital ads, while still hitting people on the other channels too. This is important to include in your plan.
2) Messaging
Your message is what you’re trying to convey with your campaign. The most important thing is to be consistent. You don’t want your digital ads to offer a different discount than your billboard. By having a consistent message, you can ensure that no matter which channel a customer is responding to, they’ll be on the same page.
3) Brand
This is another way to ensure consistency across all of your channels. By creating a brand board, you can get your whole team aligned with the right colors, logos, and fonts. This makes it easier to construct a cohesive omnichannel experience for your customers.
You should also establish your brand’s vision, and how this campaign will help accomplish it. As long as you have this why, the how will come together.
Of course, this isn’t everything there is to know about omnichannel marketing. That’s why it’s part 1! That being said, the information in this article is a great starting point for anyone wanting to boost their marketing success.
With an omnichannel approach, you can provide a smoother experience for your customers. You can increase the response and conversion rate by reaching your audience in more ways. Omnichannel is a must for any company that wants to grow.
So what are you waiting for? Make your next campaign omnichannel, and you’ll see the results. Look out for part 2, where we’ll give you even more information about this superior strategy.
