Whatever channels or devices your customers use to engage with your business, they expect a joined-up and hassle-free brand experience. Clued-in marketing managers recognize this, and deliver it through a strategy known as omnichannel marketing.
Read on to find out the essential ingredients for omnichannel success, and discover how DAM (Digital Asset Management) is such a valuable tool for creating the type of cohesive, revenue-winning customer experience your business should be aiming for.
What is omnichannel marketing?
Omni-channel, Multi-channel, Cross-channel… Aren’t these just different buzzwords to describe essentially the same kind of thing?
They all describe business strategies stemming from the fact that customers use lots of different channels to interact with brands. However, those three terms actually describe three different types of strategy for businesses to follow.
Multi-channel describes the practice of using more than one media channel (e.g. your website, YouTube, Instagram, banner ads) to interact with customers. However, with a basic multichannel approach, each of these channels works independently of each other. Your Facebook page, paid ads and website may all have their own style, content and message. What’s more, there’s not necessarily any communication between the different channels.
Cross-channel marketing is similar to multi-channel, apart from one big difference: the various channels are connected, allowing customers to jump seamlessly from, say, downloading a coupon on social media to completing the purchase on your website.
Omni-channel goes a step further. It doesn’t just focus on making it easier for customers to switch between media channels to complete their purchase. Rather, it looks at the entire customer experience to make it as cohesive as possible.
Key elements of effective omnichannel marketing include clear, consistent messaging and imagery across all channels. Those channels work in a unified way to strengthen your brand, while also making interactions with your business as convenient and intuitive as possible for customers.
Why is omnichannel marketing important?
Three quarters of consumers use more than one channel for shopping. 59% say that given a choice, they would always opt to do business with a retailer that offers a seamless shopping experience.
First and foremost, embracing omnichannel marketing is pretty much essential if brands are going to meet customer expectations. A confusing, inconsistent experience is likely to cause customers to head over to your competitors.
Research also suggests that omnichannel marketing boosts customer retention and lifetime value (LTV). So it’s not surprising that around 90% of retail leaders regard an omnichannel marketing strategy as crucial to their success.
What are the pillars of a successful omnichannel strategy?
For a successful omnichannel approach, focus on the following areas:
Channel identification
Where should you focus your marketing resources? Research the behavior of your target customers to determine which specific channels they spend the most time on, and which ones they use to inform their buying decisions.
Marketing and advertising
What categories of marketing material are your customers most likely to engage with? Again, customer research is key. These days especially, video and similar highly visual content resonates particularly strongly with audiences. You’ll need to create content optimized for each of your channels, and you’ll also need to devise and enforce branding guidelines to ensure message consistency.
It’s a lot to manage and keep track of. Fortunately however, the right DAM solution can go a long way in helping you keep on top of both content production and ensuring consistency (see below).
Operations
Ideally, your multiple sales channels will need to be integrated into a single system for inventory management. This allows you to be alerted when it’s time to replenish your stock levels, based on sales activity from right across the business.
Shipping and fulfillment
If a customer finds out that they chose the wrong sales channel to get your best price on shipping, they’re likely to be pretty annoyed. Aim for consistent pricing across all platforms, and consider using shipping software (again, covering all your channels) to enable customers to choose from a range of options that best meet their needs.
How can DAM help?
A DAM (Digital Asset Management) platform provides a centralized location to store and organize all digital content and assets, such as images and video. Here’s why DAM technology proves especially valuable for brands that want to build a successful omnichannel marketing strategy…
Consistency
Your aim with omnichannel is to deliver a consistent, compelling message across all platforms. DAM keeps you in control by making it easy to organize, update, stipulate usage rules – and, where necessary, remove the digital assets in play in your business. It ensures consistency, and drastically reduces the risk of ‘off-message’ content appearing in your campaigns.
Scalability
Omnichannel marketing isn’t as simple as posting the exact same content across all platforms. Yes; you’re aiming for a unified message, but a banner ad is, of course, very different to a YouTube video. You need a constant stream of fresh content optimized for your platforms of choice. With BOOM Worksite, you can tag and organize assets to make them easily searchable and reusable. It even comes with an editing tool and intelligent image resizing, so team members can change or optimize old assets for new uses, without the need for specialist design skills.
Speed and flexibility
Successful omnichannel marketing requires the ability to keep up with ever-changing consumer preferences and behavioral patterns. The beauty of DAM is that everything you need to create a new campaign or refresh an existing one is there at your team’s fingertips. Quicker production, ease of collaboration and less time wasted on error correction: all of these ensure that you’re fully equipped to respond to changing customer needs.
Find out more about digital asset management with BOOM Worksite
Ready to provide your customers with an awesome, joined-up experience across all touchpoints?
