In one of our previous posts, we discussed how important it has become for businesses to deliver a seamless experience to their customers – across all possible platforms. Be it the desktop or any mobile device that they are using to interact with the business, omnichannel marketing has become extremely important in the digital world.
Omnichannel marketing focuses on businesses aligning their content and design across all platforms to maintain consistency. Be it a B2B or B2C business, marketers today need to offer a seamless, compelling and highly personalized experience to their customers across all devices and channels.
There are about 62% of companies that plan to implement an omnichannel marketing strategy and 70% companies consider it very important for marketing success.
The concept of omnichannel marketing is fairly new in the digital industry and the consumer market is hyper-informed – this results in most businesses making small mistakes in delivering a consistent strategy and losing out on customers who form judgments in seconds.
7 Omnichannel Marketing Strategy Mistakes
Here’s taking a look at the most commonly made omnichannel marketing strategy mistakes that are costing businesses their customers, and how to fix them.
1. Not maintaining a consistent brand message
The value proposition you put on in the market is your brand’s voice or message. It is the promise you’re making to your potential customer. The message is what helps them understand how your business would add value to them, and why they should choose you over the other options available in the market.
Maintaining a consistent message across all your platforms – online and offline helps build trust in your target audience. It delivers your proposition in a better manner, without overwhelming the audience and promotes brand loyalty at the same time.
2. Not adding value to the target market
The idea behind omnichannel marketing is not just to maintain a consistent brand message on all channels. It is also important to ensure that you’re adding value to them every time you reach out. Irrelevant or non-contextual content not just breaks the audience’s trust, but also is a waste of your resources.
Every piece of content you make use of in omnichannel marketing must be able to deliver a unique and valuable experience to the customer. Businesses that offer insightful information to their customers regularly are considered as an authority in their domain.
3. Not measuring the results across channels
According to multiple studies, there only a handful of marketers who are able to effectively measure the performance of their cross channel marketing strategies. This, in turn, results in them not being able to quantify the ROI on their omnichannel strategy.
Companies like Wigzo empower marketers with tools that don’t just automate marketing processes using machine learning but also help effectively personalize omni-channel communication. They track the performance of campaigns across all the channels consistently to deliver deeper insights into the target market. This gives businesses an opportunity to further optimize the experience they offer to their customer and audience.
4. Not collating the right customer data
A lot many times, marketers create their strategies without looking into customer data across multiple channels. This results in the business losing out on valuable insights about their audience – their online behavior, sales triggers, purchases and more; resulting in missing out on opportunities to acquire them.
It is important to integrate robust data and analytics into an omnichannel marketing strategy. Using machine learning, you can update the data as the market changes and this enables marketers to create more relevant content.
The higher the relevance, the more effective is the cross channel campaigning. For instance, product recommendations, timely alerts, tapping into market opportunities and creating better loyalty programs.
5. Not optimizing the campaigns consistently
Creating an omnichannel marketing strategy does not mean that you can set it up and constantly reap benefits from it. You are supposed to capture more audience data based on the experience you offer and identify areas you need to improve.
The key to omnichannel success is to constantly measure the performance of cross channel and individual campaigns, and optimize the strategy accordingly. The primary aim is to improve the customer’s experience further down the sales or conversion cycle, based on his needs and preferences.
6. Not using product inventory as the marketing asset it is
“Omnichannel” doesn’t have to be a super complicated, technical term. Sometimes it’s just a matter of leveraging the data you already have in a novel and unique ways. One of the more creative ways for a company to bring omnichannel to life is by starting to use localized online shopping data to decide what to stock in the store.
If a certain something sells well with the customer of a particular place, it makes sense to make sure that product is stocked in the physical store of that particular city.
7. Not being able to respect the silos
It is all too common for a business to keep their customer data from one channel separate from another channel. The problem here lies in the internal conflicts between the physical and the digital worlds. Luckily, there are extremely easy ways to bring data together to create a unified customer view.
The stores, the catalog, and the digital teams should all come together and share how you as a group can manage things better and exceed your customers’ expectations.
Over to you
The only way to acquire customers in times when they do not just have access to information on what they want, but also other competitive businesses they can engage with instead, is to deliver an impeccable experience to them.
Focus on offering a seamless and highly valuable experience with your business, and you’ll instantly draw more ‘loyal’ customers who will then also act as brand advocates.
Remember to create a seamless customer dialogue across every stage of the buying cycle with an effective omnichannel strategy!
Editor’s Note: This article was first published on Aug 15, 2016, and has been updated regularly since then for relevance and comprehensiveness.
