What Is Omnichannel Marketing?
There was once a time when buying only happened in the brick-and-mortar stores, and in the early days of ecommerce, on personal computers. It goes without saying that this is no longer the case and that buying is no longer a linear process. It is essential that businesses deliver a consistent and uninterrupted brand experience across all channels and devices. In comes the omnichannel marketing strategy.
What Is An Omnichannel Experience?
Imagine you are browsing online looking at a pair of shoes that you like, you add the shoes to your cart and then get distracted and don’t finish the purchasing process. Later that evening you are checking Facebook on your iPhone and you see an ad from the same retailer featuring the same shoes you were looking at. A few clicks later and you just discovered the shoes are still sitting in your shopping cart!
Just as you are ready to checkout, your iPhone dies. So you open your laptop and open the company’s website to see that you are able to finish the purchase right where you left off.
This is how customers in today’s fast-paced and digital world expect to buy. With the convenience of using several devices and channels. Not only that, the modern customer expects a seamless buying experience online and offline as well. A buyer may be comparing prices online and then come in to the brick-and-mortar store to make their purchase. Or visa versa, a buyer may look at physical products in the brick-and-mortar store and then make the purchase online. However customers are buying, they need to be able to pick up where they left off.
How To Get Started
Brands that have not embraced omnichannel marketing will be left behind in the quickly moving and evolving digital world. So how can your business begin to craft an omnichannel marketing strategy? We have come up with five suggestions for streamlining and optimizing your digital marketing technique.
1) Become Social.
Social media marketing helps to validate your brand. More than 53% of millennials identify social media as one of their preferred ways to communicate with a business. Social media marketing increases brand recognition, improves loyalty and increases conversions. It is important to stay relevant and reiterate the same mission statement in an engaging and interesting way. Try using the same hashtags and brand tags across all social media platforms.
2) Consistently manage content on all platforms.
Your brand lives on the internet across all platforms like Google, Facebook, Yelp and Twitter. Ensure your customers are seeing the best representation of your business and brand across these platforms by staying up-to-date and consistent with content.
3) Prioritize your customer experience.
We know you prioritize your customers in your store, so now take that mindset online. Be sure to account for the customer experience across all platforms through seamless navigation and design.
4) Mobile first.
Remember that mobile is the center point of most people’s experience, and it must be at the center of the way you design your experience. You want customers to come back for this experience, so create an unfragmented mobile journey for your customer.
5) It’s not about YOUR customers.
Omni means all knowing, so this means not only being aware of your customers, or your competitor’s customers, but ALL customers, including ones you have not yet reached and marketing to them as well.
