There are many channels that you can use to successfully connect with your potential customers, but the only way to ensure a consistent message across all platforms is through omnichannel marketing.
With the above in mind, creating a successful omnichannel marketing strategy requires a significant amount of planning. In addition to understanding the customer journey across all relevant channels, you also have to ensure that every department within your marketing team works in unison to achieve your campaign goals.
In this article, we’ll go over the definition of a marketing omnichannel strategy and share examples of businesses that drive online purchases using this approach. We’ll also discuss the importance of promoting your brand using the applicable channels. And, we’ll give you tips on creating campaigns that produce a seamless experience across all channels.
Omnichannel Marketing Definition
What is omnichannel marketing? Is omnichannel marketing important for the client experience?
In simple terms, omnichannel (or omnichannel) marketing is the process of combining branding and sales messaging across all relevant touchpoints in order to move customers down the sales funnel. This includes online and offline channels used by your target audience.
Rather than focusing on one single platform, a marketing strategy with an omnichannel approach ensures that you make contact with customers at crucial points during the decision-making process. The best part is that it can help you build customer loyalty because, through this technique, you can reach customers-to-be through their favorite platforms.
Difference Between Multichannel and Omnichannel Marketing
Now that we’ve covered the definition of omnichannel marketing, it’s important to understand how it’s different from multi-channel or multichannel marketing.
Multichannel marketing is an approach that focuses on promoting products and services across more than one channel. This technique can leverage both your physical store and online channels like social media. With that said, these campaigns are usually focused on getting more sales rather than creating a consistent customer experience.
Omnichannel methods focus on creating a great customer experience by connecting with audience members, regardless of the platform they use. This means that to be effective, omnichannel strategies need to be tailored to each company’s audience. In other words, you need to analyze your customer data, figure out which platform your audience utilizes, and create a consistent experience across all of these.
Advantages of Omnichannel Marketing
Creating an omnichannel experience during your buyer’s journey usually unveils actionable insights and produces better overall results than single-channel campaigns.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the benefits of boosting in-store purchases with omnichannel advertising.
Improved User Experience
Delivering content in a timely manner and being well-prepared for common customer interactions is a great way to build a better user experience.
Companies that deliver relevant content at crucial moments also boost their brand loyalty, attracting “omnichannel customers” that are more aware of the services and products being promoted.
A Consistent Brand Across All Channels
Using different branding elements like tone and color schemes across marketing channels can be detrimental to your overall campaigns. Fortunately, omnichannel approaches ensure that your brand remains the same across multiple channels, regardless of how many you need to leverage.
More Accurate Metrics and Higher Revenues
Collecting customer data from individual platforms is a great way to optimize distinct channels. Omnichannel techniques can help you consolidate all of this data and improve the accuracy of the data you collect.
If you have data that better reflects the mentality and purchase ability of your audience will result in more profitable marketing campaigns that yield higher revenues.
How Digital Marketing Tool Omnichannel Approaches to the Next Level
The idea of creating an omnichannel marketing strategy began close to 2010, which is no coincidence at all.
There is no denying that digital platforms have revolutionized the way that companies engage the customer segments they target. The idea of building an omnichannel plan was inspired, at least in part, by digital platforms as these allowed marketers to collect data, analyze their results, and make adjustments seemingly without effort.
The Steps to Create an Omnichannel Marketing Approach
An omnichannel marketing campaign can exponentially improve your customer engagement metrics. But, creating a wholesome strategy that takes all relevant channels into consideration can be challenging.
Remember that every company is different. This means that you need to evaluate your budget, goals, and requirements to create an omnichannel customer experience strategy for your company. The tips below should work as general guidelines, but take the time to tailor each step based on the traditional and digital channels you plan on using.
1. Study the Audience and Collect Information
The first step is to study your audience and collect information about how customers interact with your brand. You should attempt to answer questions like:
- What’s your customer lifetime value?
- Do most of your customers like shopping online? Or do they prefer to seek help from an in-store sales team representative?
- What channels do these individuals use to research products?
- Do you guarantee customer success in any way? What does this mean in the context of your company?
- Are there customer feedback collection systems in place right now?
2. Analyze the Data
After you’ve collected data about your audience, you need to identify the different patterns that can help you build a better digital marketing omnichannel plan.
Go through the information you collect and try to notice distinct behaviors. This includes whether your average customer prefers a desktop or mobile device. At the same time, you should also assess whether customers use a combination of both and at what point they switch from one to the next.
3. Create a Customer Journey Map
At this point, your customer journey map should start taking shape. However, to have a successful omnichannel strategy, you need to proactively map out the rest of the steps new customers take before completing a purchase.
While doing this, also attempt to identify customer operations that can be completed via marketing automation as this will reduce the amount of work you do for your omnichannel campaigns.
4. If You Haven’t Already, Create a Brand Identity Guide
It’s difficult to maintain a consistent brand identity if you haven’t defined one yet. So, before moving forward, you should take the time to create a brand identity guide and make sure that all of your team members are familiar with it.
This will help your sales associates during most customer engagements and it can even result in a higher number of repeat purchases.
5. Launch, Test, and Optimize
Finally, it’s time to launch your campaign and monitor how customers respond to it. But, remember that this is not the end of your omnichannel marketing campaign, but merely the beginning of the next step.
All successful omnichannel marketing strategies rely on a strict testing and optimization protocol. This is actually a best practice of digital marketing that also needs to be observed across your entire omnichannel plan.
What Companies Use Omnichannel Marketing?
Want examples of omnichannel marketing? All you need to do is look at global brands like:
- Coca Cola
- Disney+ Streaming
- McDonald’s
- Shopify
- HubSpot
Ready to Create an Omnichannel Strategy? Contact Fannit Today
Building an omnichannel digital marketing plan can be challenging, especially if your customers use a variety of platforms to connect with your audience.
If you want to learn more about boosting sales in your brick-and-mortar store through an omnichannel campaign get in touch with us today.
