December 5, 2022
In today’s media-heavy environment, creating a consistent brand experience across all marketing platforms (both digital and traditional channels) requires a solid omnichannel marketing strategy. Technology has impacted everyone’s life and is more integrated into our everyday routine now more than ever. With hundreds of marketing messages bombarding consumers daily, this strategy will help reinforce your brand and drive prospect and customer engagement up.
A good omnichannel marketing strategy may include using social media or a referral partner’s email marketing to direct customers to an online shopping platform. These platforms direct a customer’s journey through a seamless experience, checking inventory in real-time and encouraging both online and in-store purchases, or a combination thereof - such as ‘Buy Online Pickup In-Store (BOPIS)’ offerings or even using the company’s mobile app to arrange curbside pickup service.
Omnichannel marketing utilizes multiple marketing platforms, both digital and traditional, to provide a seamless customer experience regardless of channel or device. Customers engage with a company in a brick-and-mortar store via an ecommerce website, mobile app, print catalog, social media, in-person meeting, or virtual gathering. Regardless if the touchpoint was in person or via an electronic device, the customer’s journey should be a seamless experience, consistent and complementary.
It’s important to maintain the same user experience as a client moves down the sales funnel to keep consistency and provide a consistent brand experience. Using marketing automation to unify each customer’s experience can be helpful.
So, if a customer journey includes multiple touchpoints across different platforms, what marketing channel gets credit for the conversion? Marketers use two kinds of models to determine conversion attribution:
Thanks to modern analytics and data collection, attribution models no longer rely on outdated analysis models.
When developing an omnichannel marketing strategy, it’s important to examine the different marketing platforms and channels through which you’ll release content.
Typically, your website is the primary hub for your digital marketing activities. It hosts information about your brand’s products and services, blog posts, useful content for your prospects, landing pages, sign-up forms, white papers, and other assets that support your customer’s journey. Businesses incorporate their ecommerce functionality on their website or on a special shop website.
Similarly, your mobile app gives your customers easy access to information on the go. This is important because, as of mid-2022, 54% of internet browsing was done via a mobile browser, not a desktop computer. Mobile apps open two key marketing opportunities: (1) The ability to use cross-app tracking, which follows users from one app to the next on their smartphones, allowing for the derivation of lots of useful information which can then be used for ad targeting. (2) The ability to send push notifications.
Your website and mobile app can work together well, and there are plenty of examples of this in today’s marketing landscape. For example, a user places an order for Domino’s Pizza on their e-commerce website. Once the order is submitted, a push notification shows up on their cell phone, which allows them to track when the pizza has been prepared, placed in the oven, left the restaurant, and arrived at their doorstep.
With an average of 7,000 advertising messages bombarding Americans daily, your brand needs to stand out. Email, SMS, and social media marketing help your brand stay top-of-mind, especially since pixel tracking and other technologies allow emails to provide personalized recommendations based on the products an ecommerce user views online. Also, social media can target users based on their interests and lead them to relevant landing pages since users voluntarily “like” pages and brands and provide demographic and psychographic targeting data in their profiles.
SMS and push notifications on mobile devices can also be used to lower cart abandonment rates by sending reminders to customers who leave items in their shopping carts.
By utilizing channel partners, you can add new prospects and customers from outside your normal target audience. Channel partner programs can broaden your audience with your partners’ existing audiences either through direct reselling or adding value by combining your product/service with theirs.
Related, affiliate partnerships can help promote your product/service to their existing audience by putting out your marketing to their audiences by sharing your affiliate link in their content marketing.
Another way to keep your brand on top a customer’s mind is creating customer engagements where they are unexpected, such as in public display advertising (billboards, signage), in strategic in-store locations, or outside a competitor’s brick-and-mortar store. In-person experiences can have a huge impact on establishing brand culture and loyalty via personalized interactions.
In today’s world, customers are more and more selective about the brands they engage with. This is because of both an oversaturation in choices and an oversaturation of advertising and marketing messages. By formulating a solid omnichannel marketing strategy, your brand will see many benefits, including increased sales. Other benefits are:
Some people might tell you that cross-channel and omnichannel marketing are the same because they deal with a marketing strategy involving multiple marketing channels. However, there is a difference. With omnichannel marketing, there can be many goals with different campaigns pushing customers to different outcomes. With cross-channel, all the various channels move a customer to one primary goal.
As you work to create your omnichannel program, use these steps to develop a strategy for each campaign.
When implementing an omnichannel strategy, your first step is to collect data. Your data will show you how your target audience interacts with different brands. You can do this in various ways, including surveys, test marketing, and analytics data. You’ll want to know their preferred devices, messaging mediums, products and feature preferences, and other segmentation data.
Once you’ve collected enough data, you’ll want to use an data analysis platform to convert your data into actionable insights. During this process, you’ll frequently confirm assumptions you’ve made - such as LinkedIn being the best social network to use for business decision-makers. Still, you may also find surprising information like they also have a significant presence on TikTok. You’ll use this data in creating your customer journey map.
For each campaign, you must be sure you’re plotting out a customer journey map for each target audience segment. This evaluates each step a prospect takes from discovering the brand or product until they purchase. Outlining each step ensures that each campaign is targeted by considering an individual’s interests, user experience, and external influences.
A brand is a promise wrapped in an experience. That means every brand experience should elicit the same emotions. A marketing team should develop brand guidelines that incorporate both the company’s overall brand (such as Pepsi) and the specific product’s brand (such as Mountain Dew). This includes the language, visual aesthetic, call-to-action language, and type of action desired. In this example, Mountain Dew’s marketing positions its product as a “must-have” commodity promoted by inspired advocates.
You may determine that the various channels that members of your target audience use are social media sites and mobile apps. If that is the case, you’ll need to focus your marketing efforts on building out a social media presence and/or creating customer-centric mobile apps that engage, entertain, and simplify customer engagement through the use of gamification, push notifications, etc.
Before you create an app, though, ensure you have a legitimate reason for offering an app and think through functionality.
The final steps of deploying an omnichannel marketing strategy begin by creating calls-to-action that your new customers will do in each stage of their journey. This will almost always start with actions such as joining your email or SMS list, allowing for increased customer retention rates and delivering consistent messaging to the user’s inbox or smartphone. Other actions would include following your social media platforms, downloading your app, or signing up for a free trial.
Before launching a large-scale campaign, you’ll want to test each campaign on a smaller audience, review the data, gather feedback, and optimize the campaign based on what they tell you they like and don’t like. Your goal is to ensure the buyer’s journey is seamless.
You may wish to work with a premium channel partner to identify a test audience. This will both introduce your brand to a new audience and allow you to utilize a group that has little to no experience or loyalty to your brand already.
You’ve likely already engaged with omnichannel marketing strategies but like any great marketing effort, you wouldn’t know so unless you really analyzed what was going on. The following are examples of omnichannel marketing strategies that helped give the best customer experience across all platforms.
Now that you know all about omnichannel marketing, be sure and use the following list of tips to develop brand guidelines and omnichannel campaign strategies:
Finally, consider expanding your reach from your base target audience customers to new ones by launching or enhancing your channel partner program. Using a platform like Relevize will help your company manage its channel partnerships so that your partners, like your customers, feel they are on a seamless and natural journey. Sign up for a free demo today to learn more.
