4 Steps to Creating an Omnichannel Marketing Strategy
Technology continues to revamp the way we make purchases every day. We've moved from an old-fashioned system of bartering and trading through exchanging cash for goods in a brick-and-mortar store, to an ecommerce system that can deliver just about anything to your doorstep in a day or two.
During each stage, marketing professionals have faced the same challenge: how to promote the right product to the right person at the right time. The goal is always how to generate the most sales at the lowest cost per sale. Today, having an omnichannel marketing strategy can help propel your business to the next level of that challenge.
Here are the first steps to do it:
Step One: Get Your House in Order
Before looking outward, you have to start by looking inward. The key to a successful omnichannel program is a well-organized, transparent, and customer experience focused organization.
Begin by making sure the company culture is built around teamwork and not around department silos. Goals and objectives of each department should be complementary and designed around maximizing the customer experience. That means customer behavior must be shared, and brand and image communication must be consistent across every customer interaction.
Step Two: Study Customer Behavior
It's no longer good enough to have a clean email list, a target audience and a catchy message for an occasional marketing blitz now and again. Even with all the concerns about consumer privacy, the reality is that most customers expect their favorite businesses to deliver the products, services, and discounts when they want them.
Consider the number of websites that now offer subscription purchasing for a discount. Customers like it when the needed personal care product, paper goods, or supplement shows up every month. They are happy to be repeat business for a small discount and place orders on an automatic schedule.
Be sure you have a good way to track consumer behavior such as what pages they are browsing, how much they spend on an average visit, and how frequently they purchase something. Use this information to pinpoint target audiences with personalized marketing messages. For example, if buying behavior suggests that a customer purchases a new pair of jeans once every six months, sending an email for a blue jean special at those intervals may be a welcomed message.
Step Three: Put Context in Your Content
High quality content is important to generate visits to your web site or social media pages. The tolerance for fluff decreases with every passing moment these days. As technology tools become more sophisticated, the expectation for not only great content is raised to a new level. Customers now want that content in the right context.
For some customers, a reminder email about an abandoned shopping cart encourages completing an order. For others, more detailed information, a white paper or a study can be in order during the research phase. And other people may respond to an advertisement suggesting a complimentary product to something recently purchased.
Step Four: Integrate Your Marketing Stack
The final step in implementing an omnichannel marketing program is to be sure your marketing stack, centered around a customer relationship management system, is in order.
Most companies may have a variety of components in their marketing stack. Some of the most common include video conferencing solutions, email service providers, data analytics, content management, print materials, and marketing automation tools.
Once you have all four of those steps accomplished, you're well on your way to implementing a successful omnichannel marketing strategy. The key is to continue to refine your customer behavior database as well as your customer experience processes. The more detailed your marketing efforts become, the more success you will experience.
