How to Create the Perfect Omni-Channel Marketing Strategy in 5 Steps

While the term “omni-channel” may seem like just another marketing industry buzzword at first, it actually represents a massive shift that’s taken place over recent years. Now, in order to reach customers where they are at with relevant, on-brand offers, marketers must create seamless experiences regardless of channel or device – and that’s exactly where omni-channel marketing comes into play.

The business practice is increasingly gaining popularity with marketers and provides a number of benefits including higher customer retention rates, higher customer engagement rates, and more frequent purchases.

So, as part of Americaneagle.com’s 2021 Forum, our digital marketing experts (Vanessa Cozzone, Digital Marketer, and Tony Stehn, Vice President of Digital Marketing) shared their thoughts on how to create the perfect omni-channel marketing strategy in five steps.

Step 1: Provide a Consistent Experience

As you build your omni-channel campaign, it’s important to map out your customer’s journey from one platform to the next to understand when and where to meet your customers on each platform. This ensure that there are no gaps in your strategy – and in order to shape your strategy, you need to look at where and how users are interacting with your brand.

Where is your audience engaging? Look at places like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Email, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. How can you find out where? Try sending a survey, monitoring on site contact forms, or signups, monitoring sharing of news, blogs, or products.

Step 2: Walk in Your Customers Shoes

The key to walking in your customers’ shoes is through personas, or fictional representations of a brands actual users. Personas provide the team with a shared understanding of users in terms of capabilities and goals.

There are three components to persona development:

1. Quantitative Analysis – Compile a comprehensive list of paying customers, include as much detailed information as possible, and then analyze the list and current data
2. Qualitative Analysis – Conduct personal outreach via your CRM or other tools, ask relevant questions, and then write up a thorough summary of each interview and analyze
3. Drafting the Personas – Things to think about include interest level, decision-making authority, specific use cases, previous solution and pain points, buying triggers, etc. 

Step 3: Find Unique, Personalized Ways to Engage

Prioritize your customer, understand their needs, and engage with them accordingly. They are the lifeline to any business and it is critical to be consumer-centric in your approach if you want to be successful. By connecting with your customers on a more personal level, you can ensure rapid growth for your business.

Here are some ways you can create personalized engagement opportunities with your customers:

1. Make personalized videos with your customers reviewing your products or services
2. Engage and interact on social media
3. Send segmented emails
4. Listen to the prospect and build a sense of community

Once you are creating personalized engagement opportunities for your customers, it’s vital to keep the loop turning!

Step 4: Determine a Fully Integrated Marketing Technology Stack

Although the future of your business is often hard to predict, one thing that we do know is that when scaling a business, you will deal with the Big 3: more people, more processes, and more complex problems. That’s why it’s essential to invest in the right technology stack.

The most successful businesses identify ways to automate tasks, remove obstacles from workflows, and streamline processes. Here are a few tools to consider:

1. Content Management System (CMS) – Allows you to control and manage content on your website 24/7/365 without needed a programmer or any technical expertise. A CMS allows you to add, edit, optimize, or remove pages on your website easily.
2. Google Analytics – Provides data on how your website’s doing which is critical for marketing teams in order to be able to optimize for performance
3. Marketing Automation – Allows teams to gain productivity, engage prospects on a more personal basis, nurture leads, and drive and measure return-on-investment (ROI).
4. Email Marketing – It’s important to send out hyper-focused/personalized email which is certainly a lot easier to do with an email marketing tool in your tech stack
5. Customer Relationship Management Software (CRM) – Helps efficiently manage leads and ensures good prospects don’t get forgotten about by your sales team. It also allows you to track marketing and sales activity, making it easy to keep contacts and conversations organized. 

Step 5: Measure Success

Data means something different to everyone based on the roles and responsibilities of the individual. Its good to collect a lot of data, however, having too much of it can be overwhelming. That’s why it’s to organize it in a digestible way.

It is best practice to organize data in two formats:

1. Executive Summary
   1. Big picture, high-level numbers
   2. Key performance indicators (KPIs)
2. Marketing Summary
   1. Acquisition
   2. Engagement
   3. Conversion

Omni-Channel in the Real World:

Here are a few examples of effective omni-channel marketing campaigns brands are running right now:

1. Starbucks Rewards – mobile app purchases, in-store purchases, and a variety of online experiences
2. Walgreens – in-store purchases, online purchases, activity tracking by connecting fitness apps to the Walgreens app, filling out vital health information surveys
3. Timberland – online experience, near field communication (NFC) technology, in-store experience, product recommendations, re-targeting

Conclusion

In order to keep up with the changing marketing landscape, it’s crucial to develop omni-channel experiences that align with your brand. At Americaneagle.com, we have a dedicated team of digital marketers that are ready to create a successful omni-channel marketing strategy for your business. Contact us today to get started or browse a list of all the digital marketing services we offer.