The one big thing in marketing is that it’s not just about one strict approach; it’s a very colorful method in which to promote your business, and this is something that we can always benefit from remembering. Yes, while the right digital platforms are undoubtedly important, and of course the messaging, we need to view marketing as a rainbow of colors, textures, and tones. This is where omnichannel marketing comes into play. Omnichannel refers to delivering a unified and consistent brand experience across online and offline platforms, ensuring customers can seamlessly interact across all different touch points to provide that consistent user experience, and should be informative of our entire approach to marketing. How should we implement an omnichannel marketing strategy within our startup?
Identifying the Key Methods
This is where an integrated marketing agency is invaluable. Identification of the channels and the devices most used by your target customers, and then prioritizing these ensures you optimize the user experience for each channel, ensuring seamless integration and then reaping the rewards.
The most important thing to remember at this juncture is that omnichannel marketing can easily be misconstrued as a method where every single marketing platform is utilized in one form or another. This is not the case. Instead, you should look at identifying what truly works with your customers, and this means going back to what they call a buyer persona.
For those who do not know, this involves developing detailed profiles of your target customers, including their preferences, behaviors, buying habits, and preferred communication methods, which will help you identify pain points and understand that customer journey. When you start to personalize your offerings for each segment of your audience based on their demographics; you identify what is truly important and you are good to go.
Aligning Content With the Buyer Journey
Of course, content is king and it always will be. So if we start to match the needs and the habits of customers at every single stage of their journey, we can optimize the message we give that aligns our brand with what they truly need.
Consistency is critical, and when we provide a consistent brand experience across all channels, this doesn’t just make things far easier for us, but it ensures that when we do capture a customer at any stage of their journey, they will be far more in tune with what we’re offering them. This makes it easier for us to understand what a customer is actually thinking and what their intentions are, regardless of where they truly are.
To align content with buyer journeys effectively, we need to identify the buyer’s journey and who they are, but then craft content that is valuable. This doesn’t just mean tapping into their pain points, but we also need to remember that tailoring content to a buyer persona is also about their style, tone, language, as well as the overarching themes like goals and desires.
Integrate Communication Tools
When we strive to personalize our interactions with customers, we need to remember that in addition to content being king, communication is queen. When customers interact with us, they need to be able to access our resources in real-time. This doesn’t just mean that we are prioritizing the customer, but that we’re also able to gather insights throughout their interactions with us. This is where email marketing can be an invaluable tool.
Email marketing has somewhat fallen by the wayside among many startups because they think that social media is a far more cost-effective solution. While there are many people who buy Facebook ads and other marketing strategies to hit the right demographic, email marketing is a perfect tool because you can constantly tweak it to personalize those customer interactions.
In addition, you still need to provide real-time assistance, which is why live chat and support tools are key, although not necessarily part of a marketing strategy. To provide that omnichannel experience, we have to look at how our customers communicate and always meet them on their turf.
Measure
Omnichannel strategies, much like any marketing strategy, require testing and measuring. Establishing the key performance metrics to track the success of your omnichannel strategy is a must. Metrics like customer retention, customer engagement, and of course conversion rates with analytics tools will give you a unified view of that customer journey. Identifying which channels are driving the most traffic, engagement, and sales means you can allocate your resources wisely.
One of the most common marketing challenges is collecting, storing, and analyzing customer data from different sources because of its resource-intensive nature. This is why we have to develop an information-storing strategy upfront. As we progress, we can slowly jettison some of the most irrelevant data, but we can’t do this until we’ve spent a long time analyzing what truly works. From there, we can start to whittle it down to a handful or two different strategies and implement something like A/B testing, as we can see which one truly works best and is the most cost-effective.
We also need to evaluate the customer experience, and we do this through surveys, reviews, and other interactions, but, above all else, it needs to be financially viable. Comparing the costs of an omnichannel strategy to the revenue we generate, we can gain far more beneficial insights into the effectiveness of these omnichannel strategies so we can optimize every single aspect.
If we follow an approach to omnichannel marketing, we will be in good company. Big businesses like Disney and Starbucks implement incredibly successful omnichannel strategies to create unified experiences. The former, of course, is a behemoth that provides countless hours of entertainment, merchandise, and through its theme parks, and Starbucks integrates a loyalty program with a mobile app and the indoor experience. But what can we learn from an omnichannel marketing campaign? Very simply, the message has to be consistent. This requires a lot of coordination, but it’s certainly something that when you get it right can be absolutely pivotal to not just how you market your business, but its overall success.
