What Is Omnichannel Marketing?
Your potential customer has continual access to content across devices and channels. It is important for today’s marketer to not only provide a quality product at an affordable price but also cut through all the noise and meet the customer where they are at.
Omnichannel marketing is a strategic approach directed at your customer’s brand experience. It involves putting your customer at the centre of your strategy and providing a unified, consistently superior, and integrated brand experience through multiple channels at all customer touchpoints.
The goal of omnichannel marketing is to create such a high-quality connection with the customers that they are compelled to take action. It’s about meeting them, regardless of what stage they are in the sales funnel with a consistent brand face, brand message, and overall experience.
This ensures that when your customers move from channel to channel, over different devices and from person to chatbot, they can do so with ease as they will be provided with one connected ecosystem. It is undoubtedly important for you to adopt tactics, strategies, and tools to support omnichannel marketing.
Does Omnichannel Marketing Differ From Multichannel Marketing?
Yes, the two differ. Although omnichannel marketing is used across multiple channels it is not the same. Multichannel marketing puts the channel at the center of your efforts whereas omnichannel marketing puts the customer at the center of all efforts. Multichannel marketing is responsible for reaching customers and letting them choose how to interact with you, whether on a website, chat, app, or phone. Whereas Omnichannel marketing focuses on creating and nurturing an exceptional customer experience and building a nurturing relationship with customers across all channels.
Why is an omnichannel experience important?
Studies show that consumers expect a personalized and consistent shopping experience across all channels, which directly suggests that they want an omnichannel experience. Customers remember how they felt after experiencing the brand at various connected touchpoints regardless of the channel or the number of engagements.
If they are left with a positive memorable experience they feel compelled to take action such as purchasing a product or telling their friends about it. An example of successful omnichannel marketing can be seen with Disney. The Disney experience is consistent over their theme parks, stores, and websites.
The branding, messaging and content is standard whether you book a room with them or order a product. Netflix has displayed superior omnichannel marketing with its ability to give a personalized unique experience from anywhere to each of their 182.8 million subscribers across a range of devices and customer touchpoints. It further elevates the omnichannel experience by sending personalized content recommendations.
Strategies For Successful Omnichannel Marketing
Omnichannel marketing is not easy given that there are so many channels, customer preferences, and other unknown variables. It is challenging for marketers to control every aspect of the customer’s experience. However, the right strategy can make the process smoother.
Your strategy should support consistency, accuracy, agility, and relevance while providing customers with a positive unified brand experience. Here are a few tips to get there.
#1 Have a strategy
As part of your strategy include a documented plan that can be shared across the organization. It should include the purpose of your omnichannel marketing program, areas where efforts need to be focussed on, and how to define success.
#2 Control Your Brand
If you intend to provide your customers with a unified brand experience then start by looking inward. Does your brand have a consistent look, feel and voice? If not then it is imperative to establish brand guidelines so that content both written and visual is developed accordingly. While planning and establishing your brand guidelines be sure to include the processes, controls people, and tools that will aid the process.
#3 Start Slow
Trying to revamp an entire marketing program at one go will become an over-ambitious and overwhelming experience. Start slowly by identifying specific customers’ needs for example to improve their checkout experience and develop a campaign around that. As you learn and improve, expand your marketing strategy accordingly.
#4 Leverage Your Data
In order to truly provide a superior customer experience across all channels, you must actually understand what the customer cares about. Your improvements in what you say or share need to be relevant to the customer’s needs. Leverage the data that you have collected to zero in on the ideal message, materials, and delivery time that will enhance your customer’s experience. Personalize the messages and recommendations that you send to your customers based on the data showing what your customers care about. This data needs to be shared across the organization so that every team can have relevant and more informed engagements with customers.
#5 Re-evaluate Your Workflows
Old and established workflows can sometimes be a deterrent to progress. Take a second look at the processes, people, and technologies that are currently involved or need to be incorporated to deliver a superior, more unified customer experience. Iron out the barriers to effective creative and marketing workflows and streamline all processes to foster collaboration and get improved outputs from your omnichannel marketing.
Optimizing your omnichannel marketing can help in winning over customers who expect simplicity and convenience and a seamless process irrespective of the channels or devices used in the interaction. Omnichannel personalization will ensure superior customer experience and increased brand loyalty.
Do you need to develop and optimize your omnichannel marketing strategies? Our social media experts at Kilowott will help you create and implement effective strategies to ensure superior and unified customer experiences. Contact us today.
