5 Tips For Creating an Effective Omnichannel Marketing Strategy

Daniel Bianchini // Co-founder

What you will learn.

With 73% of customers using multiple channels in their buying journey, focusing your marketing efforts on just one channel or two will never be efficient. You risk missing out on a significant portion of your target audience who prefer different channels.

Meeting your customers where they are is the way to go.

In this article, we’ll explore how you can map out your customer journey, ensure consistent cross-channel branding, personalise content according to data, and ultimately, create an effective omnichannel marketing strategy.

Understand Your Customer Journey

Omnichannel marketing aims to deliver a unified brand experience to customers, regardless of whether they interact with your brand through a physical store, website, mobile app, or social media.

Mapping out your customer journey is the first step to achieving that. Here’s why:

It helps you understand customer behaviour. For every touchpoint of your brand, you can identify what customers like and dislike and how they behave on that channel. You can use this knowledge to make your marketing efforts more customer-centric.
A well-mapped-out customer journey enhances personalisation. Understanding customer behaviour allows you to deliver personalised messages and offers that resonate with them. This can lead to higher engagement and conversions.
It optimises your marketing strategy. You can identify the most effective channels and tactics for reaching your target audience by analysing customer data. This helps you optimise your marketing spend and maximise your ROI.

Create a Buyer Persona

You can create buyer personas to identify your customers. This involves defining the customer’s age, profession, personal goals, and other demographic data. Using a persona lets you see your brand from the customer’s perspective, helping you map out their journey more effectively.

To create a detailed persona, you need to track customer behaviour. Here are a few ways to do that:

Use analytics tools. Monitor your website traffic, conversion rates, click-through rates, and more metrics. Additionally, you can check your social media engagement and email marketing performance to gauge customer sentiment and preferences.
Gather customer feedback. Ask your customers directly about their experiences, satisfaction levels, and preferences. You can do this using surveys, feedback forms, and your customer service platform.
Track customer pain points. Observe your customer support interactions and track common frustrations presented by your customers. This will help you identify factors that might be negatively affecting customer behaviour.

Align Your Strategy

Once you know where your customers are on their journey, meet them there. For example, if they are just discovering your brand, you might want to:

Create blog posts, articles, or videos that address their common questions and pain points.
Share valuable tools, templates, or guides to showcase your expertise and provide immediate value.
Encourage them to follow your brand on platforms where they are already active.

Meanwhile, you can offer loyalty programs to existing customers and ask for their input on your products or services to further improve their experience. The key is to personalise their customer experience and tailor your messaging accordingly to increase engagement, build trust, and drive conversions.

Ensure Consistent Branding Across All Channels

A strong, consistent brand identity makes your brand memorable among customers, regardless of the channel that they interact with. It also makes your brand appear more reliable and trustworthy.

Establish Your Brand Guidelines

To achieve that consistency, develop a comprehensive set of brand guidelines. This will give your marketing staff a clear framework to maintain a solid and recognisable brand identity across all platforms.

When developing your guidelines, you typically start by defining your brand’s personality traits. Decide if you want your brand to appear friendly, professional, innovative, or something else. This also involves establishing your brand’s core values, which guide all communication and design decisions.

You should also determine the style and language that you will use in your communications. This includes specifying the logo, colours, typography, and other visual elements that represent your brand.

Train Your Staff

Educating your marketing staff is just as important as defining your brand guidelines—they are the ones who will execute your marketing strategy. Here are some tips to help you effectively train your team:

Make sure your brand guidelines are easily accessible to all team members. You can provide a shared repository where they can access your marketing materials.
Conduct ongoing training sessions to reinforce the importance of brand consistency as well as your specific branding details. If you decide on any changes to your guidelines, make those changes known to your team, too.
Regularly audit your website, social media channels, and other digital properties to ensure consistency in branding and messaging.

Integrate Your Marketing Channels

You don’t stick to siloed channels when you adopt an omnichannel strategy. Instead of offering independent experiences on each of your channels, integrate and combine them to provide a smooth journey to your customers.

Let’s say a customer adds an item to their online cart on your shopping website. You can:

Send an immediate email confirmation to the customer’s inbox, detailing the item in their cart and providing a link to complete the purchase.
Follow up with an SMS reminder about their pending purchase, perhaps with a link to the order details and a discount code to encourage them to finalise the order.
If the customer has the store’s mobile app installed, ensure that they see the item added to their cart within the app and receive a push notification about their pending purchase.

This way, you keep the customer consistently informed about the product across various channels, which could be a purchase factor for them.

Importance of Channel Integration

When you coordinate messages across channels, you can build a stronger brand presence and avoid confusing your customers. They are also more likely to notice your brand if it’s present on multiple channels, which can increase their purchase intent.

Channel integration is also helpful in resource efficiency. Implementing a single approach across all channels streamlines your process, making your campaign easier to run. You can also share assets and repurpose them for different channels, which can save you time and money.

Connect Your Online and Offline Channels

Many consumers like to research products online before making a purchase in-store. By tracking their customer behaviour, you can offer highly personalised product recommendations that may entice your customers to visit your physical locations. According to Google, omnichannel strategies drive around 80% of in-store customer visits.

One way to maintain a consistent customer experience both online and offline is to leverage your CRM system:

Collect and store customer information from various sources, including website interactions and social media activity.
Offer personalised product recommendations based on this data, e.g., customer preferences and purchase history.
Create targeted in-store promotions and events tailored to customer interests.

Here are a few more strategies to connect your online and offline channels:

Provide in-store Wi-Fi to encourage customers to connect to your online channels.
Add QR codes to items to let buyers access more product details or continue the purchase later on your website.
Encourage customers to share their in-store experiences on social media using branded hashtags.
Offer rewards and discounts that consumers can redeem in-store using your mobile app.

An excellent example of this is how Starbucks integrated its mobile rewards app with the in-store experience. Customers can easily reload their cards, earn rewards points for every purchase, and even skip the line by placing orders in advance. This integration not only enhanced the overall brand experience but also encouraged loyalty.

Use Data to Personalise Customer Experiences

A study by Google and Ipsos reveals that 75% of consumers want brands that understand their needs. Meanwhile, 67% of smartphone users are more likely to buy from brands with websites customised to their location.

Providing localised content is just one aspect of personalisation; customising other parts of the buyer experience will only make it better. Here are some ways you can approach data-driven personalisation:

Know Customer Sentiment

By understanding consumer sentiment, you can deliver highly relevant product recommendations and offers. For instance, if a customer expresses frustration with a product, you could provide a discount on a complementary item or offer helpful support resources.

The best way to assess customer sentiment is through surveys like Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys, customer satisfaction surveys, brand awareness surveys, and more. To maximise participation, keep these surveys concise and make them available across all your channels.

Segment Your Audience

A one-size-fits-all marketing strategy might only resonate with some customer groups. For example, some customers may respond well to social media ads, while others prefer email newsletters. Actively pursuing only social media campaigns without boosting your email marketing might lead to dissatisfaction and missed opportunities.

Identifying these customer groups is essential. By segmenting your customers based on their preferences and behaviours, you can tailor your marketing efforts to each group and ensure your messages reach the right audience.

Here are a few ways to segment your customers:

Demographic groups, considering age, gender, income, and occupation
According to the customers’ psyches, i.e., lifestyle, interests, and personality
Customer behaviour, based on their purchase history, loyalty, and usage rates

Proper Data Handling

Customer data can benefit your business when it is properly sourced, stored, and managed. Here are some data management best practices to follow.

Follow GDPR and related regulations and policies. In addition to complying with data protection laws, this will earn your trust by assuring customers that you can protect their privacy.
Give your customers control over their data. Let them decide on the data that they want to share. For example, when visiting your website, let them customise which data you can collect using cookies.
Be transparent about your data usage. Communicate what you do with their data, including retention periods and any sharing practices. By being transparent, you can avoid misunderstandings or concerns about data privacy.

Continuously Test and Optimise Your Strategy

The market is constantly changing, and so should your strategy. By identifying what works best for your target audience, you can allocate your resources more effectively and maximise your ROI. This means continuously testing and optimising your campaigns to ensure they resonate with your audience.

Conduct Tests

Perform A/B tests and multivariate tests to see which versions of your content are most effective for your customers. For example, you can do an A/B test to compare two different headlines for an email.

If you want to experiment further, a multivariate test could evaluate two different headlines, two different images, and two different calls to action all at once.

Gather Customer Feedback

Customers know themselves best. By directly asking them for feedback, you can understand precisely what they want from your brand. You can use surveys to facilitate this direct communication. Once you have gathered feedback, adjust your offerings and marketing efforts to better meet their specific expectations.

Track Key Metrics

Leverage the analytics tools available in your channels. For example, Instagram offers a suite of analytics tools that can provide valuable insights into your audience, engagement levels, and overall performance. These metrics can help you identify your best-performing content, customer sentiment, and other factors that you can use to improve your marketing approach.

Conclusion: Mastering Omnichannel Marketing for Success

While it might take more effort to achieve, an omnichannel marketing strategy is rewarding when done right. It targets long-term business growth as it can enhance customer engagement, boost satisfaction, and make customers loyal to your brand.

To develop the right strategy, you need a solid understanding of your customers and well-established brand guidelines. These elements will guide your marketing efforts, content creation, and data-driven personalisation. As your campaign progresses, continually optimise your strategy using tests and performance metrics.

As consumers explore more platforms, don’t miss the chance to connect with them wherever they are. Start crafting your omnichannel marketing strategy now. If you need more insights, take a look at our case studies. For personalised advice, book a call with Common
Ground today.