How to create an omnichannel marketing strategy?

Research your ideal customers. Buyer insights enables an organisation to identify new customer segments, create a new customer value proposition and create content that addresses their goals and challenges .

Use buyer persona templates to define buyer personas or marketing personas. Buyer personas enables you to define a consistent buyer experience across multiple channels keeping the buyer in mind. Buyer personas focuses your efforts in understanding buyer motivations, behaviours, goals and challenges.

This will enable you to create and serve content that is informed by past interactions they have had with your organisation and their stage in the buying journey.

Understanding your potential customer’s buying journey will provide insights into the channels that they prefer for researching solutions and what information they are seeking at different stages of the buying journey. These insights will also shed light on the decision criteria used by your buyers while making purchase decisions at the decision stage of the buying journey.

Deliver a consistent brand experience across all touch points, keeping the buyer in mind as opposed to the business or product. Help them every step, in their journey to finding a solution to their problem.

Use an iterative approach to design, implement and test omnichannel marketing for your business. Your omnichannel marketing will enable you to progressively learn more about your prospective buyer at every stage (including the decision stage, customer loyalty stage) of the buying journey.

Omnichannel marketing enables a seamless integration of customer messaging across both online and offline touch points. It is important to use a marketing platform that helps you to communicate this consistent message across channels to your prospective buyers.

As an example, when you are running a marketing campaign on a social media platform (e.g. linkedin). Assuming that someone signs up for a white paper or your newsletter. This is recorded as a lead in your CRM. You then decide to nurture this lead using emails.

You begin to engage this lead by providing relevant information based on their stage in the buying journey. When the timing is right, the prospective buyer requests to be contacted. The sales team then makes contact with the prospective buyer via phone or email to further understand their needs. This is followed by a tailored solution offer that addresses their needs. 

An omnichannel marketing campaign that communicates a consistent message across channels makes lead generation, lead nurture and conversion possible.

Case Study - Supermarkets lead the way

Prior to the pandemic, the percentage of customers shopping groceries online was less in comparison to other product categories like fashion. Most supermarkets in Australia sold their products via brick and mortar stores. However, supermarkets in Australia started investing in e-commerce, mobile apps and digital product development a while back.

When the pandemic hit, we were all increasingly reliant on using digital marketing channels to buy our groceries. The supermarkets were prepared for this shift in customer preference and behaviour. They were able to quickly pivot to a click and collect model. They were able to deliver a consistent shopping experience between physical and digital channels.

Shifting an organisation to a click and collect model requires changes to organisation capabilities, customer value proposition and business model. Organisations need a good integration of online and physical channels to make this work. Organisations need to create awareness of this new offering with customers, by adopting an omnichannel approach. The customer service teams also need to be geared up for fulfilling both online and in-store orders.