Do you understand the modern customer in 2019? Can you see your business through their eyes and from their perspective?

In a nutshell, this is what omnichannel marketing is all about and it will be crucial to ensure that your future marketing campaigns are successful.

A key thing you have to understand about the modern customer is that they don’t have just one way to interact with your company. They don’t have one way to buy from your brand. They have multiple choices from tablets to computers or phones.

It doesn’t stop there because on that device they can engage through social media, your website, an app or email. Customers may even start on one channel and through the buying process switch to another.

Research shows this to be true. To complete one task, ninety percent of device owners will switch between three or four different sources.

So, you need to make sure you make it as easy as possible for them to do this. You need to be delivering clear, seamless routes to get from one to the other and still complete that crucial buyer process.

Cross channel sales were predicted to exceed $1.8 trillion in 2018. If you’re successful here, then you can gain a piece of that delicious pie for your business. But first, you need to understand a little more about omnichannel marketing.

Omni-Channel Marketing Explained

We’ve highlighted that omnichannel marketing is all about what the customer wants and we know how they’re interacting with brands on the modern market. What we have to do now is to bring these two concepts together and build a marketing campaign around it.

The way people progress through the marketing tunnel is not the same as it once was. In the past, people would start at a search engine, head to a website and find themselves at the checkout page.

Or, they could start at social media, hit a link and then click buy. Today, things are different. It’s more likely that they’ll start at a search engine, find the site, switch to social media and potentially make the final purchase in store.

Think about how many devices you have personally. You don’t use just one, you use them all, and you may switch around in exactly the way we have just described. Buyers are doing the same thing.

The channels aren’t just tech-related either. They could be a catalog, a newspaper or anything else you can think of. A billboard could be one step now involved in a marketing funnel.

Businesses need to incorporate this concept into their marketing and build campaigns around these ideas. Nearly half of B2B and B2C companies are already using omnichannel marketing so this isn’t about being ahead of the curve.

It’s about catching up to the competition.

How Does This Work in Practice?

One of the best things about omnichannel marketing is that you could use it to transform a loss into a win. For instance, you might find that a product you sell is very successful in the market.

However, there might be an issue with that item causing complaints. But what if you could solve that issue?

What if you could pinpoint the problem customers are facing and then building a promotional campaign around solutions? Suddenly, you are appealing to what matters to your audience and strengthening a product with a weakness.

Rather than hitting one type of marketing resource such as email, you could hit several. You could produce content and graphic design for in-store marketing, webpage content and social media posts.

This could lead to fantastic levels of success and not just for that product. It could build awareness of your entire brand and expand your reach.

Or, how about colliding digital marketing with brick and mortar promotion to build sales? If you hired digital billboards, you could use these to promote and display trends on Twitter for a certain hashtag related to your business products.

These could include on-point trends that customers will love and that could indirectly lead to them visiting your store. The best part is that the stores could be in walking distance from those billboards.

So, customers could see the promotion and then head to the business location. You could reward customers for engaging with the Twitter hashtag displayed with locked content. This is exclusive info from your business that is only accessible through the campaign.

The best part about these two concepts is that they’re not imagined. They are real examples of how the business has successfully used omnichannel marketing with great results.

Now you know how it works in practice. Let’s explore some of the best ways to build your omnichannel marketing strategy.

Building Your Strategy

Knowing Your Customer

We can not stress how important this is as a starting step. You need to make sure who your customers are, what they want and what they need. This should be an intimate connection.

There are various ways you can build up this knowledge. You can encourage feedback from customers and make sure you are using social media to connect. Analytics can allow you to track different trends and references to products or services you offer.

You can get then gain insight from customers and build a campaign around this insight. Look at the channels they are using.

Exploring this data will ensure that you are targeting and using the correct resources. It will ensure that your campaign does reach the maximum potential on the market.

Optimization Is Essential

We’re not talking about SEO here. Instead, we’re referring to mobile optimization. Remember, customers will switch between various devices even as they proceed through one buying process.

You need to make sure that your website is prepared for all of them. It shouldn’t cause them any issues or difficulties when they, somewhat inevitably make a switch. Pay particular attention to post-click landing pages as these need to load seamlessly.

Utilize Data

It’s already been stated, but it is worth repeating this point. Data will be an essential piece of your marketing campaign. In 2019, data can be the greatest weapon in your arsenal.

These days, data is so specific that we can explore and examine the individual responses to real customers and then create a complete campaign around these responses. We can do this through individual channels and ensure that we are delivering exactly what customers want or expect.

This means that you need to use data in the right way.  You can do this through marketing automation. This will allow you to build detail profiles of your customer. It will ensure you can quickly determine which data files are important and which can dismissed.

Once you do this, you will then be able to build buyer personas You will immediately know how to market to specific customers and clients. You will know what type of marketing appeals to certain demographics and which don’t.

Keep It Personal

Ultimately, the marketing you create through this campaign should be personal and appeal directly to individual customers. No two customers are the same but when you explore the data, you’ll discover trends you can use.

Perhaps the simplest example is the difference between a customer that has never bought your product before and a repeat buyer. For a repeat buyer, you can use the data you already have to market to them.

You can offer purchase recommendations directly connected to what they have bought from you before. This sends a clear message that you know the customer.

For the new buyer, you can show them you value them, and provide them with reward-based content for exploring your brand.

Build Up The Tech

As we showed in the real-world examples, there’s a great benefit to gain from building up the different tech included in your campaign. You just need to work out which tech tools work well together and how to make the most out of these pairings.

When you join tech together to create a united marketing campaign, it’s referred to as a ‘marketing technology stack.’ There are various tools available from a CMS to print materials or marketing automation and video or web conferencing.

CRM, customer relationship management software will always be at the heart of your stack. This will shape the rest of your campaign.

Is It Worth It?

If we haven’t convinced you that omnichannel marketing provides tremendous potential for your business, perhaps it’s worth instead exploring statistics. Studies suggest that customers that shop around multiple channels provides companies with 30% higher lifetime value.

Essentially, they’re more likely to give you the crucial repeat sales that keep the lights on. They even spend more with one research study suggesting that customers shopping on multiple channels will spend, on average, ten percent more online.

We hope this helps you understand why omnichannel marketing is useful and how to use it for your business in 2019.