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What Is Omnichannel Marketing & Why You Need It

Developing the right marketing approach is vital for the long-term success of your brand. While there are lots of strategies you can leverage, omnichannel marketing is one of the most important for a variety of reasons.

Today, let’s take a closer look at what omnichannel marketing is and why you need to incorporate it into your overall marketing strategy.

Omnichannel Marketing Explained

Omnichannel marketing is best thought of as a marketing strategy that integrates and incorporates all customer “touch points” into a seamless marketing journey. Customer touch points are any moments or decisions in which a customer interacts with your brand. For example, common touch points include:

  • When a customer first visits your brand website or brick-and-mortar store offline
  • When a customer clicks on a product page
  • When a customer sees an advertisement

Through an omnichannel strategy, each of these moments will feel integrated or like part of a cohesive marketing strategy. In other words, your social media ads, paid advertisements, website design, and email messages to a prospective customer or site visitor will all feel like part of the same ad effort.

A typical omnichannel approach usually incorporates a few major elements, including:

  • A consistent and identifiable omnichannel retail brand vision, tone, and aesthetic on mobile apps, ads, ecommerce sites, physical stores, and much more
  • Personalized messaging to each customer based on their interests or indicated desires. Again, this offers a seamless experience and higher customer satisfaction by integrating automation with customer data and metrics, often in real time
  • Marketing content that is informed by the buyer’s current stage and by any past interactions the customer has had with your brand

Odds are that your marketing tactics incorporate at least some of these elements already. For instance, your marketing materials are probably designed to be cohesive or feel like they belong to the same company. But omnichannel experience marketing takes things to the next level.

The Importance of Using an Omnichannel Marketing Approach

Omnichannel marketing is important, especially in the modern marketing arena, because customers interact with brands on many different channels. These include customer service hotlines, traditional advertisements (both digital and out-of-home), and social media.

However, omnichannel marketing is also important because new advertising technology has advanced and enabled new levels of marketing personalization. These days, you can collect a wealth of data on both prospective and current customers and market effectively to them by referencing specific deals, desires, and more.

Through omnichannel marketing, you can ensure that your brand message provides a consistent experience across all channels and gives customers the personalized experiences and marketing they need to make purchases.

When leveraged properly, omnichannel marketing initiatives should result in more consistent interactions between your customers and your brand. That, in turn, will lead to better customer experiences, more engagement opportunities, and more revenue across the board.

In addition, omnichannel marketing gives your brand a chance to reach out to customers at the perfect moment to convince them to make a purchase. In other words, it can prevent your marketing efforts from accidentally resulting in a misstep or overreach, which can drive customers away from your company if you aren’t careful.

The Benefits of Omnichannel Marketing

Omnichannel marketing provides lots of important benefits to brands that utilize it wisely.

Improved CX/Customer Experience

Firstly, omnichannel marketing almost always results in an improved CX or customer experience. Omnichannel marketing focuses on individual experiences across many devices and channels. In this way, you can ensure that a customer’s interaction with your brand across all marketing materials is fun, engaging, and emotionally resonant.

Put another way, omnichannel marketing focuses on the customer instead of the platform or channel specifically. In many cases, this can improve retention rate and sales.

Cohesive Brand Strategy

The omnichannel marketing strategy can also assist your brand by helping you create and maintain a cohesive brand strategy and identity. When your marketing team focuses on creating a seamless marketing experience across multiple channels rather than multiple separate segments, your brand image, tone, vision, and other elements will naturally unify as a result.

The best way to do this is to focus on your target audience’s values, needs, and other elements. Again, this highlights the focus of omnichannel marketing on customers rather than specific marketing channels or even specific results. The plus side is that your brand strategy may lead to increased customer loyalty and even more effective targeted messaging.

Boosted Revenue

The multichannel approach can and does oftentimes result in increased revenue, too.

If you plan and execute your marketing strategy effectively, all that focus on omnichannel customer experience may lead to more conversions and customers more willing to take a chance with your brand if they haven’t before. More engagement, after all, means that your customers have more chances to decide whether to make a purchase or convert in some other way.

Furthermore, the targeted messaging in omnichannel marketing helps to build up loyalty. That makes it more likely that a customer will make not just one but repeat purchases from your organization. That’s very valuable, especially considering that it usually costs more money to acquire a new customer than it does to keep a customer coming back time and again.

More Attribution Data To Analyze

On top of the above benefits, omnichannel marketing often helps your brand by letting you gather more attribution data.

Through omnichannel marketing and specific tools, you can track engagements across many different channels. In this way, you can determine which of your marketing channels are most effective, which types of advertisements result in more purchases or more customer engagement, and so on.

The more data you gain, the better you can iterate and improve your customer journey and your marketing strategy as a whole, both across online channels and in person.

Omnichannel vs. Multichannel Marketing

Omnichannel and multichannel marketing may seem similar, but there are some distinct differences between both concepts to be aware of.

Omnichannel marketing is cohesive and emphasizes consistency in the user experience at all stages of the customer journey. It’s also cross-channel by nature. Multichannel marketing, in contrast, looks at specific channels and distributes content and advertisements strategically in order to maximize conversion, such as hot chatbots or customer support communication channels to build customer relationships.

Multichannel marketing strategies usually try to emphasize brand availability to customers across as many channels as possible, including online marketing, in-store marketing, and much more. In doing so, multichannel marketing gives customers options to interact with a brand at multiple points. The downside?

Multichannel marketing often leads to silos or single-channel, isolated customer experiences. Multichannel marketing tactics may not necessarily cause customers to attach emotionally to brands as readily as they would otherwise. However, multichannel marketing can still be effective, especially when utilized in conjunction with omnichannel marketing and in the appropriate places.

Since customer needs may not be met with all digital channels, keep brand experience in mind when using multichannel marketing.

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Ultimately, omnichannel marketing is a robust, comprehensive way of integrating all the aspects of a customer’s prospective journey and ensuring that your brand marketing is as cohesive as possible. With omnichannel marketing, you could see much more positive marketing results in a matter of weeks or months.

Of course, other tools can help you achieve your marketing goals as well. AdQuick is the number one out-of-home media platform to help you find and manage billboard ads in your local market. Try it today to see how it can help your OOH marketing campaign thrive.

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