Written by Jenna Bunnell – Senior Manager, Content Marketing, Dialpad
Omnichannel marketing isn’t the future, it’s the present. If you’re not already using it, or have heard the term before but could do with a refresher, then this article is for you.
Essentially, omnichannel marketing is a content strategy used across all channels to improve customer experience and drive sales in a way that you couldn’t do before, especially in the digital space.
By embracing omnichannel marketing, you will, by extension, be integrating all of your sales, product, and customer data, providing you with holistic customer profiles and a far greater reach for your business. Let’s dive in!
Attract cross-platform shoppers
Gone are the days when you would likely only be operating out of a brick-and-mortar store. Your advertising and marketing would be clumsily aimed at everyone, and how well you did on a monthly basis would feel largely out of your control.
Not anymore. Now there are myriad ways you can reach customers, and not just any customers, but customers who would be interested in buying products and services from you.
If there’s one thing the digital sphere has brought us, it’s variety. With all the different platforms that people use, everyone has their favorites, be it a particular social media site or webpage. We all use different kinds of devices to view these platforms, too.
Omnichannel marketing takes advantage of this by putting you across all of these with your unified message and brand. This way, you can not only reach every potential buyer out there but also capture those who use multiple platforms (as many do) into your funnel.
It worked wonders for the likes of Lounge Underwear, a women’s underwear store based in the UK, which recently expanded into the US market. Using omnichannel marketing, the business was able to present its millions of Instagram followers with high-quality photography designed to lead them to its online store. This increased its revenue from social media platforms by almost 400%.
Boost customer loyalty
Omnichannel marketing has the effect of boosting customer loyalty. This is arguably one of the most important things to achieve in business, but it’s notoriously difficult to attain.
What omnichannel marketing does though, is build trust between you and your customers. Because your brand will have a solid presence on various platforms, whether it’s a website or a Vancouver-based phone system, potential buyers will hear and understand your message more clearly.
The variety of channels that you’ll be operating on will reinforce everything your business says and does; repetition is a powerful marketing strategy in its own right. It also means that when you find your customers, they will value your unified message.
Take luxury begging retailer, Brooklinen, for example. The company views retention as one singular entity rather than something split across various different channels. “Email, SMS, direct mail, we bring them together, so we speak to a customer like they’re one human being and not five separate channels.”
Beauty retailer Sephora, meanwhile, builds loyalty with shoppers by providing rewards for purchases and offering gifts on members’ birthdays.
Omnichannel marketing also provides a unique personalized experience for buyers, causing them to value and, in turn, be more loyal to your brand. This is much more achievable with access to various popular digital platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and more.
Increase your sales and revenue
Omnichannel marketing will considerably increase your digital ad sales campaigns and, ultimately, your revenue figures. Being present across more digital platforms places will give you greater reach and, therefore, ensure you’re more able to capture additional business.
This omnipresence will strengthen your brand recall, increasing trust and loyalty. If potential buyers see your ads and have more opportunities to purchase, then it stands to reason that you will make more conversions.
This also has the side benefit of promoting more repeat purchases. The sheer ease of using technology to shop with e-commerce increases the chances of a repeat visit from those happy and loyal customers, especially if you have a subscription model in place.
As stated before, omnichannel marketing also makes it easy to personalize the shopping experience for your customer. This will have them wanting to buy, as they will appreciate the individual care and attention that this strategy promotes. Your brand can go even deeper in building a connection through contextual targeting, allowing you to integrate with content that audiences and consumers truly love.
Big Blanket Co did exactly this by developing a mobile-first marketing strategy with a focus on delivering personalized and timely responses. Within four months of the strategy’s launch, text messages accounted for 18% of the company’s total revenue.
Be more consistent
Whether you’re using B2B marketing or B2C, modern technology and the internet have their pros and cons; it’s good because you have a greater reach, but bad as it’s harder to stick with a unified and balanced message. With omnichannel marketing, you can iron out those creases and be more consistent across all platforms, thus strengthening your brand awareness and building trust with your client base. You can also use a marketing automation tool to ensure consistency. For example, sending out automated emails at various touch points in the customer journey.
Another trap businesses fall into is putting all their marketing eggs in one basket, such as prioritizing one viral trend or being comfortable with a single social media platform over a more balanced approach that better reflects their audience. For example, a strong Facebook presence may not benefit your company in the way developing more creative content for TikTok would. If you’re unfamiliar with a platform, collaborating with industry experts such as BBTV’s Creator Growth team or hiring a specialist from a TikTok marketing agency can help you build a consistent and active audience base.
Many also forget how efficient seemingly older technologies are, such as email and text. However, pairing these classic methods alongside your online presence can gain you more sales in the long run. It’s like the difference between traditional phone networks and Dialpad business phone systems in Toronto.
Leverage customer data
In the past, there was no such thing as customer data. Someone would buy your product and effectively disappear, potentially remaining utterly anonymous to you.
It’s different now. With the technological revolution, we now have information and data that can be harnessed for you and your business.
If a customer buys from you, be it online or even in person, it is far easier and even accepted that you will capture their data. With additional tools such as social media moderation, you can really understand your customer demographic.
But this information not only benefits you to help you better understand who your client base is, but is also good for your customer as you will be able to target them with specific mailshots and marketing campaigns in the future.
This strategy is worth its weight in gold to jewelry store Kendra Scott. After initially focusing on prioritizing predicting ROI impact, the brand switched its attention to gaining a deeper understanding of its customers. It says the information and data gathered from its customers helps formulate the direction of its business going forward.
If your marketing efforts are not yielding the desired effects and need some help, reach out to our Ad Sales team to learn how you can authentically position your brand in the world of digital content, and leverage one of the largest creator networks on the globe to gain the upper hand. A unique opinion or access to more robust data-processing tools and targeting can significantly improve your output.
Take your brand to the next level with omnichannel marketing
So as you can see, omnichannel marketing is not only useful but essential to your brand’s success in today’s fast-paced world. In many ways, you can’t afford to ignore it, as you’ll get left behind by those who are already harnessing its power.
We’ve only scratched the surface here, but whether you want to increase your sales (and let’s be honest here, who doesn’t?) or boost your customer loyalty, this is a highly efficient way to go.
Don’t let your research stop here. By all means, begin to implement some of these strategies, but take this information and go down the rabbit hole of omnichannel marketing, as it’s a big topic and, really, one that you will never stop learning about.
—
Jenna Bunnell – Senior Manager, Content Marketing, Dialpad
Jenna Bunnell is the Senior Manager for Content Marketing at Dialpad, an AI-incorporated cloud-hosted unified communications system that provides valuable call details for business owners and sales representatives. She is driven and passionate about communicating a brand’s design sensibility and visualizing how content can be presented in creative and comprehensive ways. Here is her LinkedIn.
