The perfect marketing campaign is wide-reaching, engaging, and emotionally resonating with its target audience members. The trouble is, it’s more challenging than ever to make the perfect marketing campaign, particularly considering modern attention spans, competitiveness in the market, and other factors.
For many brands, the best bet is to pursue so-called omnichannel marketing: a type of marketing that involves leveraging several channels simultaneously toward a unified objective or goal.
Given this type of marketing’s complexity, it can be challenging to plan and manage a successful omnichannel marketing campaign, particularly if you have yet to try one.
Today, let’s take a look at omnichannel marketing in detail. We’ll also explore how to plan and manage the best omnichannel marketing strategy for your brand and target audience.
What is Omnichannel Marketing?
Omnichannel marketing involves boosting your brand’s presence or selling products across several channels simultaneously. More importantly, omnichannel marketing guarantees a positive, seamless, and unified-feeling experience for your customers throughout their customer journeys.
In an optimal omnichannel marketing campaign, customers don’t feel like they are moved from social media to an advertisement to a website in a clunky, over-the-top way. Instead, they think they naturally encountered a brand, learned more about it, and were organically brought to a purchase or subscription page.
Most omnichannel marketing campaigns are designed to solve customer needs, whether making a customer aware of your brand or solving an existing product issue, etc. Here’s an example of omnichannel marketing in action:
- You produce a high-quality coat that your customers love.
- However, one of the coat’s accessories, like the belt or a pair of gloves you include with the purchase, continually goes missing.
- You use omnichannel marketing to tackle this problem, producing digital content across channels like social media, email newsletters, and web promotions.
- In all that material, you demonstrate how your customers can wear the coat without the belt or add their own belts to the coat to maximize their self-expression.
- Because you use omnichannel marketing across multiple media channels, most customers get the memo quickly and easily, and any potential frustration is nipped in the bud.
Omnichannel vs. Multi-Channel vs. Cross-Channel Marketing Strategies
Though they sound pretty similar, there are some differences between omnichannel, multi-channel, and cross-channel marketing strategies.
Multi-channel marketing uses more than one channel, not all the marketing channels you have in your repertoire. Furthermore, multi-channel marketing emphasizes a product or service rather than a unified, exceptional customer experience that leaves your target audience members feeling fulfilled.
Similarly, cross-channel marketing involves using two different marketing channels for the same overall goal, such as pushing one product or service. Again, the focus is on something other than creating an excellent customer experience or ensuring that customers feel cared for throughout their purchase or subscription journeys.
Why is Omnichannel Marketing Important?
Omnichannel marketing is important because it creates positive, comprehensive experiences for your customers through every stage of their journey. On top of that, when practiced correctly, omnichannel marketing can help reduce customer churn, meaning you get more value out of every marketing dollar you spend.
The Challenges of Omnichannel Marketing Campaigns
While omnichannel marketing can be highly effective, it can also take time to do correctly.
Given the nature of omnichannel marketing, you must focus on several marketing channels at once and create a wealth of material that feels thematically consistent and unified. On top of that, some marketing content and message types are inherently best for specific channels. It can be difficult for many brands to know how they should market across different channels while maintaining the same message or overall feel for their customers.
In other words, omnichannel marketing campaigns are complex, difficult to plan, and even more challenging to maintain correctly. However, the proper preparation and tools can help your omnichannel marketing campaigns get off the ground and produce fantastic results for your brand.
How to Plan and Enact the Ideal Omnichannel Marketing Effort
As your business sets up an omnichannel marketing strategy, you’ll need to prepare accordingly. Check out these tips to plan and enact the perfect omnichannel marketing effort for your customers and overall goals.
Focus on User Behavior
Firstly, create all your omnichannel marketing materials – such as ads, product pages, newsletter emails, and more – while accounting for user behavior. You need to plan the experiences your customers will find when they encounter your brand. Determine:
- How customers are most likely to first interact with your company
- Where your customers will go upon becoming aware of your brand
- How your customers will likely interact with your products and services
By thinking about this ahead of time, you’ll better understand your target audience members and can direct how their experience should flow across marketing touchpoints.
Segment Users for Personalization Purposes
It’s also a good idea to segment your user base so you can personalize marketing materials like emails, product suggestions, and even advertisements. Analyze your customer data and segment your users into key categories based on their behavior patterns and displayed preferences.
Use the Right Omnichannel Marketing Tools
Naturally, you’ll also need to use omnichannel marketing tools that bolster your efforts. Automation tools are great once your marketing campaign is up and running, but you’ll also want to use comprehensive marketing platforms like Mediatool.
Mediatool allows you to make impactful campaigns using an intuitive and easy-to-use dashboard. Collaboration features enable team members to collaborate and access the same customer data: a critical concern if your omnichannel marketing effort includes simultaneous work across multiple channels.
Even better, Mediatool unlocks all your media data for further analysis. With this element, you’ll be able to make impactful campaigns that resonate with your target audience. You’ll also be able to optimize or improve your omnichannel marketing strategy as it goes on by gathering and studying collected data.
The right tools will allow you to design and manage an omnichannel marketing campaign like never before, all without getting overwhelmed or running into some of the challenges mentioned earlier. Ensure you have the ideal software tools and applications before launching your next campaign.
Context is King
As you’ve likely heard elsewhere, context is king when it comes to most marketing. But that’s doubly true in omnichannel marketing.
Remember, omnichannel marketing aims to provide services, products, or brand awareness to prospects and target audience members. Therefore, you must ensure all your materials are contextualized according to your overall goal and accommodate a comfortable customer journey.
Check out these examples to see how you can apply context to your omnichannel marketing materials:
- Do you give prospects suggestions for products or services based on browsing history or which pages they spend the most time on?
- Do you offer products or target your marketing based on website visitors’ locations and browsing history?
- Are you trying to upsell or cross-sell customers by combining similar offers and products? If so, are the connections and benefits of purchasing both (or more) things easy to grasp for your prospects?
- Do you send abandoned cart emails that can be viewed on many different devices, not just desktop browsers?
- Are your customers more likely to use a desktop, laptop, or mobile device? If it’s the latter, are the marketing materials you send them optimized for mobile viewing?
Ensure All Web Pages Are Responsive
Last but not least, your omnichannel marketing will only be successful if all associated web pages are responsive. Responsive webpages detect the type of device that a customer or visitor uses, tailoring their functionality or size to those devices.
For instance, you can have a product page or landing page that detects whether a customer is on a desktop or mobile phone. In either case, the page will respond and make itself more navigable and intuitive for the target user in question.
This ties into omnichannel marketing because it ensures customers have a more comfortable, enjoyable experience navigating your marketing strategy and brand materials.
Conclusion
When leveraged correctly, omnichannel marketing can be an important and effective tool for your organization. Good omnichannel marketing will bring more people than ever to your online or retail store and increase revenue or subscriptions across the board. Investing in omnichannel marketing is cost-effective in the long term, enabling you to keep marketing successfully to your target audience members for years to come.
Tools like Mediatool can help you create impactful, converting campaigns across multiple channels. With our insights and intuitive platform, you’ll be able to plan, launch and manage a great omnichannel marketing strategy for your brand. Contact us today to see how Mediatool can help you!
