Long gone are the days of only needing to advertise your products and services on the local radio station and in the phone book. With every technological advancement in the digital space, you can wind up with dozens of different outlets, sites, and spaces where current or prospective customers might be hanging out.
So how do you market to and connect with an audience that could be anywhere? This is where omnichannel marketing comes in.
What is omnichannel marketing?
Omnichannel marketing is an approach to customer engagement that focuses on creating a seamless, customer-centric brand experience across various channels including media, devices, and more. It’s a marketing approach that considers the customer journey across multiple touchpoints and seeks to integrate them into one seamless experience (at least from the customer’s perspective).
From a mobile app to email marketing messages, loyalty campaigns, in-store experiences, digital marketing messages, and more, omnichannel marketing focuses on user engagement in order to drive greater reach, increased sales or conversions, and improved customer satisfaction and retention.
What is the difference between omnichannel marketing and multichannel marketing?
Omnichannel marketing should not be confused with multichannel marketing. The main difference here is that omnichannel marketing focuses on the customer first and foremost. It takes into account possible paths along the customer journey and focuses on tailoring messaging to create a holistic experience.
Multichannel marketing, on the other hand, focuses on viewing each different marketing channel as one outlet and not part of an overall journey[1]. In other words, the website is just the website, and it is treated differently (at least in terms of marketing strategy and approach) from the Facebook page or the brick-and-mortar store.
Why does omnichannel marketing matter for small businesses?
Small businesses in particular can see a significant boost by implementing an omnichannel marketing approach, and for a number of reasons. While most everyone is familiar with the giant corporations and brands in the world, building that familiarity with your own target audience, no matter how big or small, is the key to enhancing customer loyalty through the development of a strong customer relationship.
Omnichannel marketing can also pay huge dividends in terms of both customer retention and the transition from new customers to loyal customers.
What are the benefits of omnichannel marketing?
Among the benefits of omnichannel marketing, some of the most valuable are:
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- Increased sales. Driving more business among new customers and loyal customers is made easier thanks to the strong connection to your brand and the additional messaging opportunities available with omnichannel marketing.
- Increased lifetime customer value. Business owners will tell you that the best customer is a repeat customer, and it’s true. From the word-of-mouth marketing they’ll do for you to the savings you gain from not having to attract and convert someone who is completely unaware of your business, repeat customers have a higher value for any company.
- Increased opportunities. Looking to liquidate stock or drive a promotion? Omnichannel marketing allows you to tailor your messaging and reach people across dozens of touchpoints with a consistent message that will drive outstanding conversion.
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What are the challenges of omnichannel marketing?
While many small-business owners and entrepreneurs can be intimidated by the seemingly enormous task of omnichannel marketing, the truth is that any business can benefit from using it. However, just as with any of your other marketing campaigns and marketing efforts, omnichannel campaigns can bring with them some challenges.
Challenge #1: Data, data, data
Omnichannel marketing is only as effective as the information you have available to develop a marketing strategy and a messaging approach that harnesses its potential. And the way to do this is with data.
Unfortunately for many businesses, customer data is often stored in very siloed, disconnected ways, meaning that there can be a lot of effort needed up front to collect and combine customer data.
Challenge #2: Personalization
Omnichannel marketing personalization means more than just opening an email with the customer’s name in the greeting. But creating a personalized journey and specific brand messages for customers across different channels does take some legwork up front before developing content for them. (This includes doing a thorough job of segmenting audiences and outlets.)
Challenge #3: Consistency
Knowing your customer(s) is the key to creating omnichannel approaches that work, but it can be tricky to create and ensure a consistent experience—and especially personalized experiences—along the buyer’s journey.
Once again, developing a solid strategy with your marketing team and honing in on your segmented customer data helps to make this a much more doable part of the process.
How can small businesses get started with omnichannel marketing?
In order to get started with an omnichannel approach to your marketing efforts, the first thing to keep in mind is to not get overwhelmed. While it can seem like a lot, the fact is that you probably already have a lot of the data and resources you need to develop and implement an omnichannel strategy for your marketing efforts.
The following steps are basic, but they will provide you with a great place to get started.
- Gather and analyze your data. As we mentioned above, one of the challenges for a lot of small companies is that data might live in very different places, and different pieces of customer data may be stuck in silos across multiple locations. So the first thing to do is find a way to pull together all of your data in order to have a more complete portrait of your customers.
- Build a diagram of your customer journey. With data in hand, you’ll have a better understanding of your buyer personas and your customers’ journeys, as well as how they interact with your brand on mobile devices, social media, SMS messaging, offline, and so on. In turn, this will inform you of your customers’ needs, demographic differences, and other key metrics.
- Segmentation and personalization. Using your buyer personas and other data, you can identify and create segments and audiences that will make it easier to create personalized content, interactions, and journeys that work for those segments.
- Messaging. Develop the messaging that will resonate with your audiences and that makes the most sense for each of the steps or channels in the customer journeys. This will make it easier to create a great user experience.
- Measure and adjust. Once your process is in place, it’s easier to adjust and optimize as needed. The key here is data, so make sure that you have a robust system in place that will help you take a comprehensive view of your omnichannel efforts and find areas where small adjustments can have a big impact.
Omnichannel marketing tips (and mistakes to avoid)
While omnichannel marketing is very effective, there are some serious missteps that can cause your efforts to fall short:
- Not having a clear strategy. Just as with any of your marketing efforts, you need a plan. And with omnichannel marketing, that is especially important. Spending more time developing a clear and cohesive strategy for your efforts will pay remarkable dividends once your campaigns are up and running.
- A lack of clear goals. What good is a plan without goals? After all, you have to know where you want to go before you can figure out how to get there. Establish clear goals and it will be much easier for you and your team to reach them.
- Incomplete data. In the case of marketing, knowing is more than half the battle – it’s the whole battle. In order for your omnichannel marketing to do everything you intend for it to do, you have to be basing the plan and content development on complete data.
- Not developing unique content. Your single-channel marketing approach can’t possibly work in an omnichannel environment, so how could a single type of content be effective across all channels? One of the benefits of omnichannel marketing is the ability to customize and tailor content that makes sense for the outlet and the audience, and is personalized for the audience to make the best connection with them.
Make omnichannel marketing part of your digital plan
Whether you are transitioning from a multichannel approach to an omnichannel marketing strategy, or you are looking to begin your marketing efforts right away with an omnichannel approach, there are a number of very helpful resources where you can learn more about how to get started. But the best approach is to have a conversation with digital marketing experts who are well-versed in omnichannel efforts, options, and approaches.
To find a selection of some of the best, highest-rated digital marketing experts who can give your business a head start, be sure to view the partners here at UpCity. Backed by reviews from small-business owners like you, it is easy to find the right partner for your needs and goals.
Sources
- Multichannel Marketing Strategy, Gartner