By now, most people have heard of the concept of omnichannel marketing – the practice of promoting your brand and raising awareness across as many channels as possible. But there have been many developments that have complicated the omnichannel approach, including a great proliferation of available digital channels, increased competition, and downstream effects of overexposure.
What does a modern omnichannel marketing strategy look like and how can you be successful with it?
The Short Answer: There Is No Singular Omnichannel Marketing Strategy
If you’re looking for a universal or generic omnichannel marketing template that you can use to make your business successful, you won’t find it here. In fact, you won’t find it anywhere, because it doesn’t exist. There is no singular omnichannel marketing strategy that’s going to work for every business. Arguably, this distinctiveness is one of the strengths of omnichannel; it can be fully customized to suit a highly specific business, with no fluff or waste.
Some channels that work for your business may be completely irrelevant to another, and vice versa. For example, let’s say you’re a real estate agent. Real estate agents often have a vested interest in building rapport and trust through personal branding – and they benefit from being seen as niche geographic experts. Accordingly, real estate farming postcards may be an excellent addition to your collection of marketing and advertising strategies, says WisePelican.
But what if you’re creating a SaaS product specifically for remote freelancers and digital nomads? In this context, many of the apparent benefits of postcards (e.g., geographic targeting) fall away – and it becomes less worthy of consideration.
Businesses have different industry allegiances, different target audiences, different budgets, different goals, and even different core audience experiences. Why should they have the same channels or the same philosophy when it comes to omnichannel marketing?
The Most Powerful Channels to Consider in Omnichannel Marketing
With that out of the way, there are some incredibly powerful channels you should at least consider in your omnichannel marketing approach – though how you use them and how you integrate them with each other is going to strongly depend on your specific business environment.
· Social media. Social media is a staple in most omnichannel marketing strategies, in part because it’s free or inexpensive to get started and in part because it has practically unlimited reach if you choose the right platforms. There are dozens of popular social media platforms to choose from, some of which have more than a billion users and most of which have tools designed for marketers and advertisers to reach and persuade their audiences successfully. If you capitalize on the right platforms and use strategic messaging, this can generate a surprisingly high ROI.
· Email marketing. Email marketing has always been a favored strategy, and it’s arguably gotten more powerful over the years. These days, people love it for its unlimited reach (as just about everyone has an email address), its ridiculously low cost basis, and its potential to be nearly fully automated. This makes the cost side of the equation ridiculously low, with significant potential upside.
· SEO and content marketing. If you plan on having a website or any online presence, you should also strongly consider content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO). These complementary and arguably codependent strategies force you to engage with your customers, and provide them with unique value. In exchange, you’ll build trust in addition to raising your search engine rankings, eventually allowing you to generate more organic traffic and capitalize on that traffic more successfully.
· Print and traditional ads. Print and traditional ads may seem antiquated in an era with easy access to pay per click (PPC) ads, but you shouldn’t be so quick to discount the potential of these strategies if you have the right type of business and the right target audience. Postcards, flyers, billboards, and TV and radio ads can still have a huge impact.
How to Succeed in Modern Omnichannel Marketing
So what steps can your business take to succeed in modern omnichannel marketing?
· Work to better understand your target audience. Your first priority is to better understand your target audience. This is a fundamental pillar for success in any marketing pursuit, but it’s especially important if you’re working with multiple channels. After all, if you don’t fully understand who your audience is or how they respond to messaging, how could you possibly choose the right channels to reach them?
· Solidify your brand experience standards. Leveraging multiple channels together is all about creating a cohesive, universal experience for your customers and prospects. To be successful here, you need to solidify your brand experience standards. In other words, what values and hallmarks are going to be presented consistently across all your channels? How will you ensure that your audience has a consistent brand experience no matter how or where they interact with you?
· Rely on objective data. The best omnichannel marketing strategies are ones that rely almost exclusively on objective data. Don’t choose a channel or create an ad based on instinct; instead, draw from market data and experiments.
· Utilize the latest technologies. AI has come a long way. So has automation. Online, you can find thousands of tools designed to help marketers reach more people, gather more data, and get more done in less time. Ideally, you’ll use the latest technologies to accomplish more, waste less, and outmaneuver your biggest competitors.
· Do something truly unique. The digital world is perhaps over saturated with advertisements, content, and seemingly infinite brands all scrambling for more visibility and recognition. In this sea of mediocrity, you need to do something truly unique in order to get noticed. What’s something that no other brand is doing? What’s the message that no other brand has said?
· Personalize everything you can. Personalization is huge in the modern era. Personalizing a piece of marketing collateral forces it to stand out and allows it to make a closer, more genuine connection with the person receiving it. People also like to have highly individualized experiences. Accordingly, you should personalize everything you can and try to make each individual experience with your brand attuned to the individual going through it.
· Make every message count (for multiple purposes, ideally). Ideally, you’ll make every message count for multiple purposes. Every marketing email, social media post, or blog post should have genuine value to your audience – and should accomplish multiple goals at the same time, such as driving traffic and building trust.
· Be persistent (but not annoying). Omnichannel strategies are more effective when you engage with your audience at frequent intervals. At the same time, it’s important to avoid annoying or overwhelming your customers. In other words, you want to send your customers enough messages and materials to stay top of mind – but not so many that you end up spamming them.
· Measure everything. Data is the heart of a successful omnichannel marketing strategy, so make sure you measure everything. You need to know exactly how much visibility, reach, impact, and return each strategy is getting – and you need to be able to review these data consistently.
· Review data and cull underperforming strategies. Pay attention to those metrics and be willing to get rid of any strategy that’s underperforming. This is especially important if your business has a limited budget or if you’re currently struggling with an economic downturn. Channels with comparatively low ROI or engagement should be cut entirely while struggling channels should be reassessed and approached in a new way.
· Double down on your best channels and tactics. Conversely, you’ll likely have at least some winners in the bunch, so be willing to double down on your best channels and tactics. Keep stepping up your investment until the returns stop increasing.
Omnichannel marketing is only going to get more complicated and more dynamic from here (source). If you’re the type of marketer or business owner who gets excited at the prospect of leveraging new technology, and if you’re adaptable and willing to learn, this is a good thing. It means you’ll have more opportunities to devise and distribute creative messaging – and more of a competitive edge over your toughest rivals. What’s most important in the modern world of omnichannel marketing is that you see it for the complex, dynamic ecosystem it truly is – and that you’re willing to navigate that challenging terrain.
Last Updated: March 12, 2024
