Hello there, I hope you’re here to learn about Omnichannel Marketing, and how can you make the best use of your own business.

Let’s see some flashbacks first before starting out with Omnichannel Marketing. Let me take you back to 2010 somewhat 12 years from now. You’ll agree that at that time social media channels were not as evolved as now. Now, every social media channel provides you with tons of features for promoting your business in this digital world and establishing yourself as a brand.

It was the same with online shopping websites. There were only some selected online stores from where you could buy your products, consumers were limited to either these selected eCommerce websites or brick-and-mortar stores. The competition wasn’t so much high and so the world wasn’t so much technology-driven.

But in the present scenario, there’re hundreds of social media channels, and thousands of online shopping websites, and everyone is trying to prove themselves better than any others in the market.

So, because of all these platforms, most brands are having multiple avenues from which people can buy their products and services. That’s why you also need to leverage all of these multiple avenues to market your products and services in this technology-driven world.

Your consumers should be able to buy from you on any platform they’re using, whether it’s social media that’s having a shop option or your website, any other online store where your products and services are being displayed, or from your brick-and-mortar store.

You can make this possible only in one way, and that’s by making the best use of Omnichannel marketing.

Let’s learn first what is the meaning of Omnichannel?

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What is Omnichannel?

Omnichannel means, all the ways and channels possible, sometimes spells as Omni-channel. Omnichannel is a cross-channel content strategy. It is used for lead nurturing by improving the customer experience and driving better relationships across all possible channels and touchpoints. In this approach, a brand gives access to all of its products, offers, and services to customers on all the channels, platforms, and devices.

What is the Omnichannel Experience?

As we all know that with the help of omnichannel marketing Brands promote their products and services in all the ways possible and in all places. But, they do this to provide the omnichannel experience.

Providing an omnichannel experience is an effort to provide an integrated and cohesive customer experience to every user no matter on which platform the user is reaching out to us. So keeping the seamless and consistent experience on each platform is called Omnichannel experience.

We’ve known what the Omnichannel experience is!

Let me ask you one important question. Do you think Multichannel Marketing and Omnichannel Marketing are single entities?

Well, they’re two totally different marketing strategies, having many things in common, but some things different. So before getting together with Omnichannel Marketing, we need to understand the difference between multichannel & Omnichannel Marketing Strategies, so we don’t get confused about which is one!

Difference between Omnichannel and Multichannel Marketing

Both the Marketing Strategies are based on the idea of engaging consumers across multiple platforms. So, the role of the user is very important here.

In the Multichannel Marketing Strategy, we look at the particular platform only and make sure that the transaction is being completed there. Multichannel is all about using multiple platforms to promote your products and services. The user connects with the multiple platforms in different conditions, and his entire customer journey is ruled by the choices he’ll make on that particular platform. These choices are being put in front of the user by the company beforehand, so he/ she will have to make purchases on the basis of these choices.

When users interact with the brands who’re using Multichannel Marketing as their marketing strategy they feel like, on each platform of the brand, they’re interacting with the different entities. Because in this marketing strategy multiple platforms are being used, but they’re used in unison, and the brand voice isn’t consistent.

But in Omni-channel Marketing, we’re just not using multiple platforms, but we make sure that all the platforms will work in unison. This is done by creating a user’s journey map before implementing the marketing strategy. In this it is assumed that the customer journey can span between 2-3 platforms, so you’ve to make sure that the brand voice and the experience on each platform should be uniform and seamless. Being users the centre of attention on every level, this marketing strategy provides the best user experience. To provide a seamless user experience in Omnichannel marketing, data of the users is collected from different sources, and then the brands make effort to personalized user experience through all the platforms.

When users interact with the brands that are performing Omnichannel Marketing in their business, they feel like they’re interacting with just one platform even switching between 2 or 3 platforms of that brand, because in this all the platforms work as a single entity, in unison for providing unified user experience, and keeping the brand voice consistent.

Last but not least don’t get confused with Omnichannel and Multichannel Marketing, you could be able to differentiate which brand is using which marketing strategy if you keep in mind just one thing: in multichannel individual channels don’t integrate with other channels, none of them speaks to each other, but in Omni-channel, all the channels are being integrated to work as a single entity.

What is Omnichannel Marketing?

Well, we’ve already discussed a lot about what the buzz is about Omnichannel Marketing, but we’ll be elaborating more.

It is a customer-centric approach in which we ensure that our clients will have a positive, and consistent user experience across the brand channels.

It is the integration of all the marketing tactics such as branding, messaging, storytelling, and all the online and offline marketing touchpoints. This is done to provide the consumers with an impactful user experience from top to bottom of the sales funnel.

It makes the users’ journey totally effortless by providing consumers, with a seamless, integrated, and personalized experience.

We can cover all about Omnichannel marketing in the following topics:

Creating a user journey map to keep everything uniform across the channels
Focuses on integrating all of a company’s touchpoints from SMM platforms, website, email, mobile, and brick-and-mortar stores.
Customers can move seamlessly among any of the above mentioned different channels without breaking the consistency of the brand voice.
It is the cohesion of different channels of marketing
Keeping your Brand voice, mission, vision and values consistent & making them identifiable on each platform
Provides personalized messaging based on the interests of the users.
Keeping your visual identity Uniform

I hope all of your doubts are obliterated about Omnichannel marketing. Let’s move ahead and discuss the steps of developing a successful Omni-channel marketing strategy.

Steps of building a successful Omnichannel Marketing Strategy

Every digital marketer and marketing agency describes the steps of building Omnichannel marketing in its own words. We’re providing the step-by-step process you should implement to build a robust Omnichannel Marketing Strategy:

Collecting User Data: Data Collection

Data collection is very necessary and to collect accurate and timely data about your consumers, every brand should use Unified Marketing Measurement (UMM). UMM is an attribution level model. These attributions are the personal level metrics such as demographics, psychographics, geographic, historic, and aggregate measurements of media mix modelling.

This data will help you in understanding how your target audiences want to interact with your brand, and which platform and device they want to interact with. This will also help you in building messaging of your brand, and what type of products are your users looking for.

If you collect the data, you will be able to develop a rough draft of what you need.

Analysing Collected Data: Emphasized Context

You have raw data that you collected in the first step, but you need to refine the data. It’ll help you in making sure what’s useful and what’s not. Analyse your data in this step.

You are thinking about what the metrics are on the basis of which we can analyse the data. You must’ve heard one thing, “Content is King”.

It’s still true but not completely, without context content is nothing. Well, we have the king now, the data we collected in the first step. But we’ve to analyse it and then refine it.

Ask some questions about the relevancy of the data such as what kind of content is your consumer consuming, when are they consuming the content, is your marketing materials relevant to what they are desiring, and what is the occasion when they feel most valued, have you optimized your content for the devices they’re using your content on?

These questions will help you in putting your raw data in different sections so that you can easily know who your consumers are and what’re their expectations?

You can also segment your users on the basis of the following factors:

Past Purchases
Behaviour
Interest
Desires
Average order value
Loyalty Status
Lifecycle

Create a Customer’s Journey Map for Personalization

I hope you would’ve understood what omnichannel marketing is all about. We all want to hear from a person, not from software or tool that automatically generates the same messages over and over again. Nowadays robots and bots have also been advanced, but they generate what we instruct them. So, to keep messaging personalized we need to create a customer’s journey map, so that they’ll feel like they’re being listened to and some person is replying to them not a bot.

Make a customer journey map for each of the segments we’ve discussed in the previous section. The customer journey map evaluates all the steps taken by the consumers from discovering the brand to purchasing from it. Outlining the customer journey map will help us in creating more targeted campaigns in Omni-channel marketing. Because when we outline the customer journey map many factors are considered in which some of which are out of the brand’s control. Always consider individual user interests, user interface, and user experience, economic, geographic, and historic factors while creating the map.

Determining Branding Rules and Guidelines

Branding rules and guidelines help you in keeping your messaging and creativity consistent on all the platforms. These rules and guidelines will help you spread awareness about your brand and make your brand easily recognizable with a consistent brand voice and visual identity.

Choosing Your Marketing Platforms: Aligning Your Website and Social Media Channels with Omni-channel Marketing

Well, you’ve complete control over your website, and social media channels also provide you with tons of features for interaction and engagement with your users.

You don’t need to run everywhere to build an Omnichannel experience, it’s a slow process. Start with your website first, your landing pages and web pages should be designed perfectly and mobile responsive. The content should adapt according to a different screen-sized, it needs to display well no matter what the screen sizes are. Start working on your website and make your website mobile responsive, if you’re unable to do that, we can help you, connect with us Team Digiavtar will take care of everything.

You don’t need to focus on every social media available in marketing, as there’re hundreds of social media platforms.

You should focus on 1-3 SMM platforms, or any number you can handle. We’re saying this because if you’re using so many platforms, and engage with your users on one platform but not on others then they’ll get offended. So, it’s better to use only the number of social media channels we can use.

Always make sure that you’re engaging with the users who’re reaching out to you from these social media handles keeping your tone of communication uniform, and posting consistently valuable relevant content to keep your audiences attached to your brand.

Solve Your Customer’s Queries in No time: Make Customer Support Your Top Priority

Whenever you’re moving one step ahead in Omni-channel Marketing, always take those steps to solve your users’ query with that step. And on the current platforms also, always try to give your users the answers to their queries as soon as possible, it’ll feel them valued, and increase their loyalty towards the brand. Every consumer wants an easy and issue-free experience, but if any issues occur, always try to solve them in no time.

Establish Your Brand Online: Keep Consistent Brand Voice across Channels but Avoid Duplication of Content

Branding is the ultimate aim of all of your marketing efforts so that you’ll not need to put effort into making you reachable, and recognizable because branding is the solution. But, I would say don’t make just a brand, but build a cohesive brand. A cohesive brand delivers a cohesive user experience to its users. Keep your persona approachable, and conversational whether it’s a SMM platform, website or your brick and mortar store.

Consistency brings the feeling of reliability and responsibility and hen trust is developed in the marketing. So we need to keep our brand voice and messaging the same across the channels making the use of uniform storytelling.

Consistency will increase brand exposure, if you’re not sure how to keep consistency then create a brand style guide before starting. Because if you’re not consistent then it’ll result in a disconnected experience and that’ll cause more harm than good.

Don’t just copy-paste the same data everywhere, but repurpose it on the basis of platforms. You can convert a blog post into a YouTube Video for YouTube, Creative for FB & or Instagram. Can also use an illustration for Pinterest, and a summary and creative for LinkedIn. It depends on you how you’re going to repurpose your content keeping the tone of communication the same. It will also save you from the duplication of content

Create Quality Content having repeated taglines

People remember taglines the most because they represent some strong emotion. Taglines are the summary of what is going to come next.

That is why whenever something is organised whether it’s revolution or any function, a slogan or theme is attached to this.

It’s easy for us to connect with the theme, and this theme represents everything for what the function is being organised.

When you’ll look at our own brand DigiAvtar, you find that a tagline is being attached to it that is “Digitalising Brands for Exponential Growth”. I hope the tagline is telling you what we stand for.

One thing to remember is always to be honest, and make genuine taglines that don’t lure people with false and tricky headlines.

Digiavtar is digitalising brands for establishing their robust web presence, and after take working on different marketing strategies for the exponential growth of the brands. So, as we’ve built a genuine tagline for our brand, so you should do that.

Keep your tagline in your own ton of communication, and unique in both online and offline marketing materials.

Invest in the Right Tools

Investing in the right tools can save you a fortune. The world is evolving and there are tools available to perform every single task. Every company is investing in tools, and you should also get one step ahead of the rest of the market.

Include a fully integrated Marketing technology stack according to your requirement in your marketing campaigns. The marketing Technology stack is the group of tools that can work together to improve all of your marketing experience.

The different kinds of tools that are being used in the marketing are the following: –

Website Designing and Development Tools
Graphics Designing Tools
Video Marketing Tools
Email Marketing Tools
Content Management and Marketing tools
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software
Marketing Automation Tools
Video and Web Conferencing Tools
Integrated Customer Engagement Tools
Social Media Management and Marketing Tools
Data Analytics and Visualization Tools

Befriend with technology, it’s better to accept changes than to avoid them. All of the tools mentioned above are very necessary for the success of the Omni-channel marketing strategy. For example, CRM allows you to record each people’s journey from becoming a prospect to a buyer.

As you can see how much CRM is imparting in this strategy, as with other tools, they’re also as much impactful and useful.

Keep your checkout process simple and streamlined

It’s a survey that most the online stores or eCommerce websites use the 3 step checkout process, and in some stores, we can see providing single page checkout. So, if you’re exceeding 3 steps I’m sure you’re going to lose a lot of consumers.

So, it’s better to keep your checkout process simple, and streamlined across the channels. You should always try to offer an easy, quick, and seamless experience for your checkout process.

It is very much necessary to make your checkout process effortless. Remove friction from your checkout process in any place you see it.

Retarget Abandoned Carts

Always retarget your consumer who’s abandoned the checkout process after adding the products to the cart. It means they trust your brand, but something is keeping them back from making a decision.

So, you can easily convert these users into customers with little effort. Give them a push by sending push-notifications when they click away from the checkout process.

It has happened to me also several times, sometimes I stopped buying the products, but when I got the push notifications, I went ahead and purchased the products.

So, implement this strategy, because when the brand sends a push notification, people feel like they’ve listened to. And it makes them feel valued, so they make purchases.

Personalize Your Paid Ads: Connect Your Digital and Print Ads

Always make your ads personalized and target according to a specific user persona. Be specific as much as you can, it’ll provide you with high ROI. You can’t target a generic audience, as everybody’s interests, needs, and psychographics are different.

As of now, you must’ve understood that being personalized is the heart of Omnichannel marketing, so you should present offers to your audiences personalized to their needs.

For grabbing the attention and making the ad copy personalized, you should pay attention to storytelling marketing, with the help of storytelling marketing, you can make sure that they’ll find your offer tailor-made only for themselves

Always keep your digital and print ads relevant and consistent, and try to connect both the platforms, because Omni-channel marketing believes in providing a unified user experience.

Implementing, Analysing and Optimization of the Marketing Strategies

As we all know that there’re hundreds of strategies that can be used in Omni-channel Marketing, but can you determine what will work for you and what will not?

None can say which strategy will work, so go implement the strategies, analyse your results of marketing campaigns, test them on the basis of different factors, then optimize the whole marketing plan, and again repeat the process.

Always use your data to find and nurture brand advocates, that can bring business without promotions.

We’ve already discussed the tools in which you should invest your money, with the help of those tools we can track the right metrics, and from analysing and testing those metrics we can derive actionable insights that can help us to optimize campaigns.

Always keep improving yourself, and make yourself comfortable with the new marketing strategies.

Examples of Omnichannel Marketing

You can see using this type of marketing in the big brands, and even nowadays small businesses also have started working on the strategies of Omnichannel Marketing.

You can identify with the following tips if the company is using Omni-channel marketing:

Getting messages or emails while visiting a website or offline store.
Getting being notified about the promotion and sale
Getting push notification to complete the checkout process
Getting thank you message after buying some products
Getting answers to your queries in no time
Seeing Visual Brand Identity and Brand Voice Same across the channels

Famous Companies who are implementing Omnichannel Marketing strategies are the following:

Starbucks
IKEA
Nike
Wall Greens
Timberland
Disney
Bank of America
Oasis
Pepperfry
Amazon
Apple
Flipkart
Google Chrome

The aforementioned companies are the world’s topmost companies that’ve included Omni-channel marketing in their marketing strategies.

We’ve seen so much in this blog but, without knowing about the benefits we can get from Omnichannel Marketing, it’ll be incomplete, and don’t you want to know what benefits you’ll get if you perform the Omnichannel Marketing tactics.

Benefits of Omnichannel Marketing Strategies

We’ve come so far and we’re certain now that this marketing technique is all about seamless customer experience. In this approach, we make effort to provide a personalized experience to each user, so they feel that they’ve been listened to and understood. And it makes them feel valued, and who doesn’t want to be valued in someone’s life?

This emotion creates a sense of comfort in users’ mind and they tend to loyal, and thus seamless sales start happening. With Omni-channel marketing, we try to represent all our marketing channels as a single entity by providing users similar user experiences on each platform. We try to fill the gap between the offline and online world, by keeping both the voices same. We all have a digital and real-world avatar. Filling the gap between the online and offline world is the best thing that makes this marketing strategy so much success in today’s scenario.

So, are you going to implement these tactics for your business now? Good luck with that!

There’re uncountable benefits of Omnichannel Marketing, but we’ve tried to summarize them in some principle topics that are following:

It helps in Reaching New Customer Segments.
Improve Customer Lifetime Value.
Provides a better user experience at every step of the customer journey.
Unify all the offline and online marketing channels of a particular brand for effortless consumption.
Provides Better Customer Data in various segments.
Helps in establishing a Uniform Brand Strategy and Visual Identity.
It increases operational efficiency by including inter-departmental coordination and agility.
It boosts customer loyalty & provides a high sense of brand loyalty and faith.
Improves Brand Recalling.
Build More Brand Advocates.
Helps in increasing revenue exponentially.
By retargeting the abandoned carts, in the end we find fewer abandoned carts in online stores.

Conclusion

We’ve discussed the many benefits Omni-channel marketing can provide to us. It can take your marketing game to the next level. Most the businesses haven’t started using it, and who’s using it are confused with multichannel marketing. They take both the same but there’s a vast difference in multichannel and Omnichannel Marketing Strategies.

Every industry is implementing Omni-channel Marketing Strategies, to gain great exposure in marketing, but the topmost industries are the following: Retail, Healthcare, automotive, Financial, eCommerce, Marketing etc. These industries are also following many trends of Omnichannel marketing such as; integration of offline and online stores, focusing on the brand building, not the channel, Using more devices for a single purchase, and leveraging multiple channels for the awesome experience.

So, if you start using it from today, then you’ll be much more ahead of everyone. Omni-channel marketing is all about the user and user experience. So, it’s your responsibility to make your community feel valued, and make their experience awesome and unforgettable. Provide your users what they desire from you, you’ll get what you want.

Provide value and make your consumers feel valued, you will also get value in return for increased sales, and engagement with an added benefit of brand loyalty.

If you still have questions about anything related to Omnichannel marketing, Team DigiAvtar is at your service, you’re free to comment in the comment section, we’ll solve your queries as soon as possible.

If you want to learn more about other marketing strategies, then feel free to check out our blog.

Omnichannel Marketing Strategy for Small Business | 13 Steps of Developing Omnichannel Marketing Strategy