March 9, 2021
How to rule omnichannel marketing in 2021
If you’re like many marketers, you hear about omnichannel marketing all the time. And finally, I’m here to explain what the buzz is all about.
To start with the basics: what is omnichannel marketing?
Omnichannel marketing is a sales funnel based on multiple marketing channels. This approach strives to provide the customer with a cohesive, unified customer experience across all marketing channels.
An omnichannel marketing experience assures that the customer experience always feels the same. A user can be interacting with the brand through a website or a Facebook page, and he’ll always receive the same look and feel and customer experience. Omnichannel marketing accounts for every device and client’s platform for a potential touchpoint.
So what’s the difference between Omnichannel marketing and multichannel marketing?
Omnichannel marketing is frequently confused with multichannel marketing. Despite, although omnichannel marketing employs multiple channels, not all multichannel marketing is omnichannel marketing.
Omnichannel marketing is designed around the user. And this is why users have a seamless shopping experience across all marketing channels.
To achieve this, all marketing channels must obtain a cohesive look and feel.
For example, a brand employing omnichannel marketing may run the same promotion across all channels, using the same creative assets and audience.
On the other hand, multi-channel marketing is based on the execution channel. Each channel may operate individually to gain the best campaign results.
With multichannel, the strategic marketing plan and the KPI’s can change between channels and won’t affect one another.
For example, a brand employing multichannel marketing may run an Instagram campaign targeting a younger audience while running a Facebook ad targeting a bit older audience. Below are some basic steps to get you started:
#1: Start with users data
Before you can even start thinking about the omnichannel strategy, you have to collect your user’s data as much as you can.
Customer data will reflect your customers—collect everything from the customers funnel, from a google search or any other ad channel through to the checkout. After you collect all the data, you can understand what’s attracting your customers and, at the same time, what’s not.
#2: Enhance the customer experience
A customer-centric approach is the most effective one, and it must be the main focus for your omnichannel strategy.
- Analyse collected data from all channels and discover the channels with the best-performing metrics and compare.
- Analyse engagement metrics and focus on your best-performing approaches.
Ask yourself: Is this the best shopping experience I can provide? How can it be improved?
#3: Segment your audience
Customer segmentation is crucial to master omnichannel marketing. There are many ways you can segment your audience; segmenting customers allows you to tailor your marketing messages by delivering to the right person at the right time.
Use data to segment customer behaviour and find trends to group your audience’s parts with similar behaviours and characteristics. You can apply profile data, shopping behaviour, engagement pattern, and different analytics to find and distinguish these groups. Once you’ve segmented your audience, it’ll be easy to know which client personas use which channels and create an omnichannel strategy that works for everyone.
#4: Develop relevant content
The content you apply for each channel is the foundation of your omnichannel marketing approach – your content has to reflect your shop’s data. To accomplish this, analyse your past campaigns data to see what works and, more importantly, what’s not.
#5: Test, test, test
To make sure your plan works, A/B test the ongoing campaigns and keep track of customer engagement and overall effectiveness.
It’s no surprise omnichannel marketing is used by more brands each day. Omnichannel marketing helps to give shoppers a unified experience across all marketing channels. With it, you can enhance customer retention, improve brand reputation, and establish a long-term relationship with your shoppers.
