While it’s never been wise to place all of your marketing efforts into one medium, it’s become essential to have multiple channels engaging clients and potential clients.
What Is Omnichannel Marketing?
Omnichannel marketing allows businesses to engage clients on all fronts: websites, social media, SEO, PPC, and of course, in person. Omnichannel marketing might sound a lot like a new term for multichannel marketing, and no one would blame you for making that assumption. After all, the marketing industry is known for its creation of new buzzwords to replace old buzzwords. But omnichannel marketing is sufficiently different from multi-channel marketing that it deserves its own name.
Omnichannel marketing integrates marketing channels in order to maximize both the client experience and the data that businesses can draw from every purchase. For instance, a customer might order a product from an ad they click while reading a news article or perusing their social media apps, but they can also find the same product through organic search results, a PPC posting, through an app, or an e-commerce site saved to their favorites. They may have the option to pay with a credit card, PayPal, or Apple Pay and take delivery via shipping, express shipping, or in-store/curbside pickup.
Every one of these seemingly limitless options can provide your business with information about which of your marketing channels are working and which are not.
How to Make Omnichannel Marketing Work for Your Business
While reaching customers through multiple channels might make good marketing sense, there are other opportunities that can assist your business to increase engagement, improve the purchaser experience, and target likely consumers.
To accomplish this, you’re going to need to create systems to track the source of each sale. At one time, marketers tracked attributions through physical coupons. When customers used a coupon from a mailer or the Sunday paper, they were providing tracking data. The business could then attribute the sale to a specific campaign.
Attribution still works like this but in a techier way. Here is a list of the tools that marketing companies use to track conversions:
Google Ads provides a treasure-trove of data, including conversions from website-generated phone calls and click conversions. It also provides data regarding traffic coming to your website or e-commerce store from social media sites.
Facebook Ad Manager – Facebook shares this dashboard with Instagram. The Ad Manager provides data about user views and clickthroughs.
App Data – A recent study showed a distinct preference among consumers for shopping on apps with 63% of those surveyed saying it’s more convenient and 57% claiming it’s faster. Mobile device apps not only increase the odds that customers will order directly from the app, but you can tailor the app to provide information about user shopping habits.
Point-of-Sale Data Collection – By creating membership programs for your customers, you can collect information about their purchases. Every time they type in their phone number, scan a bar code or QR code, you can tie their purchases to their identities.
These are, of course, just a few of the ways to collect omnichannel attributions, but omnichannel marketing also depends on how you use attributions to improve your focus on key demographics and how you can enhance your appeal to your target market.
Why You Need a Professional Omnichannel Marketing Firm
A professional omnichannel marketing firm can introduce you to new ways to reach your audience, refine your existing tactics, assist you in determining the allocation of your marketing budget, develop attribution detection processes, and much more.