Omni Channel Marketing

Omnichannel marketing is the seamless integration of branding, messaging, and online and offline touchpoints as consumers move down the sales funnel, enabling a more impactful customer experience.

Omnichannel marketing takes a consumer-centric view of marketing tactics. Consumers can now interact with brands on innumerable channels, from social media to customer service hotlines. An omnichannel approach ensures that the consumer has a positive, consistent experience on each channel, by offering a few key elements:

• Consistent, identifiable brand tone and vision
• Personalized messaging based on specific interests
• Content that is informed by past interactions and current stage of the buyer’s journey

Benefits of Omnichannel Marketing

The perception across the industry is generally that “omnichannel” is that north star. While having and enabling multiple channels certainly isn’t bad, seamless unification and integration and automated execution should be the goal.

A successful omnichannel marketing strategy can help your organization realize the following benefits:

1. Boost Customer Loyalty

Customers purchase from the brands they value and trust. Omnichannel marketing efforts provide a consistent experience across all platforms and offer a personalized experience for each audience member. This approach improves the overall customer experience and leads to increased customer loyalty and retention.

2. Improve Brand Recall

Omnichannel marketing’s emphasis on cross-channel consistency ensures your customers will see your brand in the same way across platforms and devices. This consistency helps strengthen brand recall for your customers. A strong sense of brand recall will increase the likelihood of purchase across your customer base.

3. Realize Increases in Revenue

Omnichannel strategies improve customer loyalty, strengthen brand recall, and promote repeat purchases. These efforts help brands retain customers and attract new customers through content personalization and word-of-mouth marketing. With more customers, comes more business and, of course, more revenue.

Attribution:

MMM: Media Mix Modeling only looks at long-term aggregate data, rather than person-level insights. While this allows marketers to see the impact a campaign had on conversions, as well as historical trends, such as times of year when shoppers increase or decrease engagements, it does not provide insight into individual preferences. MMM also uses several year’s worth of data, meaning teams cannot use this model to optimize campaigns in real-time.

MTA: Multi-touch attribution offers granular, person-level data in real-time across each touchpoint. When analyzed, teams can use this data to make changes to campaigns as they run, to better cater to consumer needs. The challenge with multi-touch attribution is that it is difficult to determine how much credit each touchpoint should be given for a conversion. For example, was the webinar or the email campaign more influential in moving the consumer toward conversion?

Steps:

1. Data Collection

Collecting accurate, timely data about your consumers is essential to the implementation of an omnichannel strategy. This data will allow you to understand when your target audience prefers to interact with brands and on what devices, which type of messaging they are more likely to engage with, what products and features they are looking for, etc. This data will be the driving force behind an omnichannel strategy.. Brands need to make sure they have the tools in place to effectively collect this data across online and offline channels. A smart way to do this is with Unified Marketing Measurement (UMM), an attribution model that combines the person-level metrics of multi-touch attribution, with the historic, aggregate measurements of media mix modeling. This way, touchpoints can be informed by individual preferences as well as historical trends such as regional or seasonal elements that affect engagements / conversions.

2. Data Analysis

Data collection is only the first step. Without a team and platform that can translate all of this big data into actionable insights, it is useless. Brands need to deploy an analytics platform that can display all of this data in near real-time so that teams can course-correct while campaigns run, to meet consumer needs in the moment.

3. Customer Journey Mapping

Before launching an omnichannel campaign, organizations should be sure to create customer journey maps for each of their audience segments. The customer journey map evaluates the steps taken between the customer discovering the brand and purchasing from the brand. Outlining these maps allows brands to create more targeted campaigns by considering individual interests, the user experience and interface, and factors outside of the brand’s control that may impact the path to purchase, such as economic factors.

4. Brand Guidelines

It’s important for organizations to develop a brand identity with clear guidelines for messaging and creative. These guidelines should be adhered to across each channels to help facilitate brand awareness and recognition through a cohesive message. Another way that organizations can help facilitate an omnichannel experience is by leveraging brand tracking tools that can help measure and predict their brand’s health in the mind of the consumer

5. Testing / Optimization

One of the most important components of an omnichannel marketing strategy is to continuously test the efficacy of your omnichannel approach. This enables the marketing team to determine ways to optimize campaign spend, messaging, creative, and more. Today’s organizations should utilize media planning tools that can run “what if” scenarios that take budget, target audience, multiple KPIs and media mix into consideration and in turn provide a highly granular media plan that can maximize ROI and inform future decision-making.