Omnichannel marketing is the newest evolution in modern marketing. While multichannel marketing delivers the same message across channels that matter most to your target audience, omnichannel marketing takes a broader, more dynamic approach. It orchestrates experiences across every available touchpoint, including websites, email, mobile apps, physical environments, and events. This dynamic orchestration drives a fluid experience.
While a multichannel strategy is useful for sending out brand messages on a wide scale, omnichannel marketing’s purpose is to take the friction out of the buying experience. This allows you to meet prospective buyers where they are in their journey. Through an omnichannel approach, content and engagement tactics happen in step with customers as you gather insight from them.
By delivering more personalized experiences, you can reap the benefits of a consistent lead management process, improved conversion levels, better real-time engagement levels, and higher brand preference. However, in order to take advantage of the benefits of omnichannel marketing, you need to set yourself up for success.
How to Kickstart Your Omnichannel Marketing
Want to know how to plan and create the perfect omnichannel marketing strategy? Here are three steps for getting started on the right foot:
1. Invest in the right technology.
Omnichannel marketing is not something you can put into practice with the same old tools. The vast majority of people in the U.S. use multiple devices and channels every day. You need to invest in technologies that can keep up with this ever-changing way of life and enable you to engage with customers where they are. Platforms like Microsoft Dynamics 365 are built for these modern marketing needs.
The right customer engagement software will orchestrate buyer journeys, coordinate segments, and collect and analyze customer data, streamlining the sales and marketing process and providing valuable information your team can act on. These technologies offer a variety of different applications you can take advantage of, helping you build a solution that fits your unique needs. They also facilitate omnichannel marketing automation, which is vital to the success of these campaigns.
2. Tear down functional silos.
Cross-functionality is crucial for omnichannel marketing success. In order to be able to communicate across channels, organizations need to work together to collaborate on messaging and orchestrate customer experiences. This can’t happen if your organization operates within functional silos.
Most senior executives agree that silos harm a company’s growth and waste thousands of dollars each day. Yet, these silos are still prevalent across various organizations. Before you begin investing in omnichannel marketing, seek out and tear down any functional silos that exist within your business.
If you need help, try partnering with a company like Coffee + Dunn. As certified marketing, sales, and service experts, we offer solutions such as change management and adoption planning, organizational planning and resource modeling, change management execution, and operations and processes improvements, among others.
3. Align around a common approach for lead qualification
Omnichannel marketing automation can be a powerful tool for generating and nurturing qualified leads. However, it can’t tell you how to manage the overall lead qualification process. In order to take advantage of omnichannel marketing, your organization has to agree on one approach for qualifying leads.
This would be a good time to revisit the buyer profiles of your best-fit customers to determine what qualifications are actually important to you. No matter your approach to lead qualification, the important thing is that you have a common strategy that all departments can align around.
Today’s buyers are constantly bombarded by multichannel efforts. To truly stand out, you need to be able to provide a connected experience for buyers that delivers the right information at the right time. Driven by modern platforms like Microsoft Dynamics, an omnichannel approach to sales and marketing makes this possible.