Omnichannel Marketing: A Guide

Consumers today have continual access to content across devices and channels, making it hard for marketers to cut through all the noise. Creating a quality product at an affordable price is no longer the only factor in a customer's purchasing decision. Brands need to meet customers where they’re at — wherever that may be.

To put the customer at the center of your strategy, you must foster positive, consistent, and integrated experiences at each and every touchpoint along the customer’s journey. And if you’re not already, you must become more sophisticated in the way you engage and serve your audiences. This can look different for every organization, but the savviest marketers are adopting tactics, strategies, and tools that support what’s known as omnichannel marketing.

What is omnichannel marketing?

The goal of omnichannel marketing is to create superior, high-quality connections that propel your customers to take action. It’s about meeting customers, no matter where they are or where they go, with a consistent brand face, compelling message, and personalized experience. And even if your customers jump around from channel to channel, device to device, or person to chatbot, they can easily and seamlessly do so because you’re providing them with relevant engagements within one connected, shared ecosystem.

What’s the difference between omnichannel marketing and multichannel marketing?

While omnichannel marketing is a multichannel approach, it’s not synonymous with multichannel marketing. There are a number of differences, the biggest of which is that multichannel marketing puts the channel versus customers at the center of your efforts.

Multichannel marketing addresses tactics that reach customers on multiple channels. It focuses on letting customers choose how to interact with you, whether via website, chat, app, phone, store clerk, or other. Omnichannel marketing, on the other hand, is all about creating, nurturing, and optimizing “the experience” across all of these channels. 

In other words, strategic omnichannel marketing elevates multichannel tactics by finding experience-enhancing ways to connect each and every interaction you have with your customers. Rather than offering a static 15% off code across all of your channels (like you might see with a multichannel approach), an omnichannel model provides customers with a more dynamic experience based on where the shopper is in their purchasing journey. For example, you may offer the same 15% off coupon to start, but then take the buyer down different sales pathways based on how they engaged or didn’t engage with the first offer. You may leverage different channels, but the content, messaging, and offers at each touchpoint is tailored to meet the buyer’s needs.  

Why is omnichannel marketing important?

According to a recent study, the majority of shoppers (75%) choose to shop with brands that personalize interactions and outreach to them. In other words, they want an omnichannel experience and prioritize the brands that give it to them. 

The importance of an omnichannel experience is that customers remember how they feel after encountering a brand at various connected touchpoints. Regardless of time, place, channel, or number of engagements, the whole of their experience with a brand leaves them with a positive, memorable impression. This feeling is important because it’s exactly what compels customers to take action, purchase a product, or even tell their friends about it.

There’s a lot of research to support this relationship between experience and action. For example, this same study revealed that 94% of consumers leave an online shopping session if the experience is irrelevant. Furthermore, 90% of shoppers are loyal to brands that understand their interests. 

Shoppers today want to feel understood. In return, they’re more likely to give brands their attention, business, and allegiance. But the benefits don’t end there. 

The benefits of omnichannel marketing

Although it takes more resources and coordination to execute, brands that embrace omnichannel marketing will reap the rewards. That’s not speculation. According to a survey of over 600 brand marketers and customer support specialists, organizations with a solid omnichannel marketing strategy are three times more likely to report a significant increase in year-over-year revenue growth than those with little or no omnichannel strategy. Reason being, revenue is often the byproduct of other omnichannel marketing benefits like:

• Better customer service due to greater visibility into the customer’s past experiences with an organization, other team members’ interactions with them, and the customer’s evolving needs.
• Deeper brand loyalty (as we mentioned) that stems from a customer receiving a more positive, relevant, engaging, and trustworthy experience.
• A more effective multichannel presence that’s interconnected, dynamic, and better positioned for success when a brand introduces new channels to their marketing mix. 
• Stronger audience connections that make for a more resilient customer base of brand influencers and advocates.
• A more consistent brand that customers recognize, no matter where they are or what channel they’re on.
   

Given this information, how do brands leverage their marketing and channel strategies to deliver these winning customer experiences?

Examples of omnichannel marketing

When we think of omnichannel marketing and the companies that do it well, business-to-consumer (B2C) examples likely come to mind, which makes sense. B2C brands were the first to really feel the effects of consumer behavior shifts in the early e-commerce days. As a result, they had to quickly figure out how to navigate the blurring lines between digital and brick-and-mortar shopping experiences.  

However, business-to-business (B2B) marketers are not exempt from delivering these same seamless, effortless, and connected experiences. B2B buyers are also consumers. They’ve grown accustomed to the omnichannel experiences in their personal lives and carry these higher expectations over to the workplace. Early on, they may not have blazed the trail but they are holding their own now.  

The omnichannel experience is important for all marketers, so let’s review examples of how both B2C and B2B brands deliver a winning omnichannel experience.  

Disney: The omnichannel marketing giant

No matter where or how you engage with Disney — be it at a theme park, in a store, on their website, or other — the experience is always consistent and tailored to your needs. Everywhere you turn, you’re greeted with uniform branding, relevant messaging, and helpful content. From Mickey Mouse ears to your experience at a Disney property, every interaction is completely integrated. While your Disney app helps you strategically navigate the parks, check on wait times, and make Fast Pass reservations, your wristband (aka Magic Band) gets you into your hotel room, allows you to purchase food, and even gives you access to photos taken throughout the day. 

Netflix: Seamless personalization from anywhere

Netflix creates a truly personalized, unique experience for each of their 283.39 million subscribers. What’s more, the company manages to do it across a bevy of devices and customer touchpoints. Whether a subscriber logs in from their laptop, phone, TV, or gaming console, they’re greeted with customized movie and TV show recommendations. Netflix even elevates the omnichannel experience a step further by sending personalized content recommendations right to a subscriber’s inbox, where they can click to view, share, or download it instantly.

Hootsuite: B2B omnichannel marketing with heart

Hootsuite is a social media management software company that helps other businesses scale their omnichannel marketing efforts. However, the company is also winning at delivering an omnichannel experience of its own. Hootsuite has a clear brand mission: to keep human connection at the heart of what it does. No matter where audiences encounter the brand — be it in the Hootsuite platform, at an event, social media, a resource download, or other — they’re met with upbeat, consistent imagery and an overall experience that captures the essence of this connection-centric brand. For more on Hootsuite marketing strategies, this case story shares a bit more about how they achieve this. 

McCormick: An appetizing omnichannel experience built on content

Known for their flavorful spices, seasoning mixes, condiments, and other mouthwatering products, McCormick has built its global brand on the colorful images, eye-catching labels, delicious recipes, helpful videos, detailed product information, and other content their customers crave. But what separates McCormick from their competitors (and there are many) is its unparalleled ability to provide customers with a truly optimized content experience. Whether you visit the company’s blog, come across a McCormick product at your local grocery store, receive a targeted ad, or talk to a McCormick customer support representative, you’ll encounter relevant, accurate, and on-brand content that the company has strategically selected to ensure you have the most engaging customer experience (CX) possible. But there’s more to the McCormick omnichannel marketing story. Read about it at the full case story here.

How to succeed with omnichannel marketing

Even for brands that have been at it for a while, omnichannel marketing is tough. With so many channels, customer preferences, and unknown variables, it’s challenging to control every aspect of the customer experience. However, armed with a thoughtful strategy and the right tools, your path to success will be that much smoother. 

Strategies for successful omnichannel marketing

There’s a lot that goes into delivering an omnichannel experience. As discussed, omnichannel marketing aims to provide customers with a positive, unified brand experience across all customer touchpoints. Those efforts look different for every organization but always involve a strategy that supports consistency, accuracy, agility, and relevance across your efforts.

Here are a few tips to help you achieve these results: 

1. Have a strategy. Yes, your strategy should include an actual strategy, a documented plan that you can share across the organization. A thoughtful strategy will help you and your teams understand the purpose of your omnichannel marketing program, where to focus your efforts, and how to win.
    
2. Control your brand. A major part of providing your customers with a unified brand experience is having a consistent look, feel, and voice. Establish brand guidelines so your teams know exactly how they can and cannot leverage your brand visuals and content helps. It's also a good idea to figure out the processes, controls, people, and tools you need to achieve this.
    
3. Think beyond the marketing team. Putting the customer at the center of your efforts isn’t just a job for the marketing department. The customer experience spans every single touchpoint within a brand’s ecosystem. From customer service reps to salespeople, resellers, product teams, and beyond — you need to ensure that everyone who touches or represents your brand provides customers with a consistent, positive, relevant experience. This may take some work to coordinate, but the key is to ensure that everyone has access to the brand guidelines, strategy, information, and content they need to execute on your plan.
    
4. Take a crawl, walk, run approach. If it feels overwhelming to revamp your entire marketing program with an ambitious, all-encompassing omnichannel marketing initiative, start small. Identify a specific customer need, such as a more seamless checkout experience, and develop a campaign around it. Then, as you learn and improve, expand your efforts. After all, Rome wasn’t built in a day!
    
5. Map the customer journey. Determining what content to share at key moments along your customer’s path to purchase helps deliver more relevant experiences. To get started, define your different audiences and their goals at every stage of a typical buyer’s journey, making sure to brainstorm possible touchpoints and the questions that you may need to answer along the way. This way, when it comes time to produce content, you’ll know what to create for each stage in the customer journey.
    
6. Leverage data. Relevance is a big part of providing a superior customer experience across channels. If customers don’t care about what you’re sharing or saying, it’s not a good experience. Use content data to understand which message and materials to deliver at what time. Personalize product recommendations by understanding the products your customers care about. And don’t keep this data to yourself. Share it across the organization so that every team can have relevant, more informed engagements with customers.
    
7. Iron out your workflows. Think about the people (both internal and external), processes, and technologies that are currently involved or should be involved in helping you deliver a better, more unified customer experience. Evaluate which creative and marketing workflows are working and not working. Then, get a game plan together to help streamline inefficiencies, foster collaboration, and get more out of your omnichannel marketing.

Tools for successful omnichannel marketing

When thinking about the tools you need to support your omnichannel marketing efforts, it’s important to consider how your technology choices can provide you with what’s known as a “central source of truth.” 

This concept supports omnichannel marketing by ensuring that everyone in your organization has accurate information, data, and assets needed to deliver a consistent, relevant, unified brand experience across every single customer touchpoint. This, in turn, fuels workflow efficiencies, team agility, and — you guessed it — an omnichannel experience. 

Here a few examples of “central source of truth” technologies:

• Digital asset management (DAM) software provides a centralized library or hub for your brand’s photos, product images, videos, collateral, and other assets or content. It’s the command center that allows your creative teams to access the latest version of design files on-demand. It’s the automation engine that replaces outdated assets across your digital channels based on the master file housed in your DAM platform. And it’s the data and scale that enables your teams to leverage the best performing assets directly in their other marketing tools, without the painful uploading and downloading.
   
• Product information management (PIM) software is particularly important for e-commerce brands with a high volume of SKUs or a complex and evolving product catalog. PIM technology provides a single view or hub to collect, manage, and enrich all the information that’s critical to communicating your products, such as descriptions, color options, pricing, feature lists, and more. Once this information is in the PIM platform, that’s it — you can automatically update it on your website and syndicate it to other channels to ensure your shoppers have the most up-to-date, accurate information.
   
• Customer data platforms (CDPs) consolidate often siloed customer data sources, such as loyalty programs, in-person transactions, online purchases, and event attendance, to produce unified customer views that ensure organizations deliver CX that correctly targets the right individual. Through technologies like identity resolution and machine learning, CDPs can identify consumer trends, buying patterns, pain points, and more to consistently offer end-to-end CX across various channels as customers move along their customer journey.
   
• Content management systems (CMSs) can push content to every digital format where your audiences might live. The days of building content one way and then shaping it to fit various channels are long past. Today, organizations can create content in one place and deploy it wherever it needs to be. Headless and hybrid content management systems are particularly well-suited for omnichannel content delivery because they’re API-first, which means content is separate from how it’s displayed, allowing users to publish to any device or channel at any time.
   
• Customer relationship management (CRM) systems store all of your organization’s contacts in one place and help you track the various sales and marketing interactions that occur between your team and your prospects and customers. A CRM platform is a staple technology for any sales organization and ensures that everyone has access to the latest information about your company’s relationships. This allows teams to work smarter and arms them with the information they need for more personalized, informed conversations.

Selecting the right omnichannel marketing tools

As you’re well aware, these technologies are just a handful of the many marketing and creative tools designed to help organizations work faster, better, and more collaboratively. The combination of technologies that work for one organization may not be right for you. The important thing is that the technologies you leverage work together to support the customer experience.

Integrating your go-to technologies is helpful. One way to do this is to place DAM software at the center of all of your tools. This ensures that all of your brand’s visual content and assets power your people and other technologies. For example, let’s say you’re leveraging a DAM, a PIM, and a CMS. Your DAM system supplies your PIM software with the most recent, approved product images, which are then accurate and up-to-date across your channels. When connected to a CMS, your marketing teams won’t have to dig around looking for collateral. Rather, the materials they need are right in the CMS, so they can quickly and efficiently communicate with various audiences. Add and subtract other creative and marketing technologies to this scenario, and you’re looking at one well-oiled, omnichannel marketing machine. 

Ready to take the omnichannel experience to the next level?

Omnichannel marketing is one way leading brands provide their customers with more consistent, relevant, personalized brand experiences. And while an omnichannel strategy takes effort and resources to execute, the benefits of a well-run omnichannel marketing program far outweigh the work required to get it off the ground. From greater revenue to more loyal customers, better customer service, more efficient workflows, stronger brand recognition, and more — omnichannel marketing can provide you with the results you need to drive lasting success. 

Ready to take the next step and connect your customer experiences in one seamless, consistent, and effortless way? Explore how DAM, PIM, and other critical marketing and creative technologies can get you there. Request, watch, or click to view a demo of the various omnichannel solutions available from Acquia today — check out what we have to offer!

Note: This article was originally published on Widen.com in September 2018 and has been updated to remain current.