How To Use Omnichannel Marketing To Reach Target Audience

Intro

Marketing is no longer defined as one-dimensional. Customers want a seamless experience across multiple platforms and devices, often simultaneously. The line between online and offline shopping has almost become blurred, where customers expect similar kinds of experience and service irrespective of the platform or device or in-store shopping.

How do you reach your customers exactly where they are and offer a better experience? The answer is omnichannel marketing.

What is an omnichannel marketing?

By definition, omnichannel marketing is a lead-nurturing strategy that offers users a seamless marketing experience across all channels, platforms, and devices throughout the marketing sales funnel. It has the customer at the center of all marketing strategies and provides a consistent experience.

An omnichannel marketing will have multiple touchpoints. Incorporating the digital channels is essential for an effective strategy. Simultaneously, it helps brands deliver a positive customer experience, allowing customers to connect with the brands. The most crucial and common digital channels include:

• Social media
• Mobile apps
• Whatsapp
• Website
• Email marketing
• Push notifications
• SMS
• In-app messaging
• Chatbots
• Display ads

How to create an effective omnichannel strategy

The most important part of an omnichannel marketing strategy is that it allows users to continue their purchase path even if they switch platforms or channels or pause and return after a gap.

The Omnichannel marketing realm is growing steadily, with more and more businesses adapting the strategy to reach their audience better. A research report by Market Research Future predicts the omnichannel market will touch $21.86 billion by 2032, owing to the rise of eCommerce platforms and social influencers.

To create an effective omnichannel strategy, 5 core concepts act as the backbone.

1. Relevancy

Customers expect interactions that are real-time and personalized. It should be tailored to their preferences, transaction history, context, and browsing behavior. In short, the whole experience should be relevant to what they are looking for.

2. Consistency

It is essential to stay consistent, especially when you want to win your customers through omnichannel marketing. Your customers want an experience with a unified brand presence at its core and worth the trust.

3. Agility

Brands must adopt an agile approach when capturing user data and analyzing user behavior. Since user preferences are continuously shifting, brands must have a scalable approach that lets them take fast actions to suit user demands. Agility in marketing also involves adapting to new trends, such as utilizing video production company services to create content that quickly responds to changing market dynamics.

4. Empowerment

Keeping your customers informed gives a sense of empowerment crucial in an omnichannel marketing strategy. This helps customers make the best purchase decisions and eventually become loyal users.

5. Convenience

Users do not like wait time. So, offering a convenient browsing and shopping experience across all platforms and devices is the crux of any omnichannel marketing strategy. It is the route to building a unique end-to-end user experience.

Omnichannel vs. Multichannel Marketing

Creating a unified brand presence requires you to tie all communications together and deliver a strong brand message. However, there are chances of confusing omnichannel marketing with multi-channel and cross-channel marketing strategies.

Omnichannel Marketing	Multichannel Marketing
Customer is at the center of an omnichannel marketing strategy	The brand is at the center of a multichannel marketing strategy
Brand message changes for each marketing channel and adapts to how the customer interacts with the brand	Communication is static, with the brand message being the same across all channels
Customer's behavior prompts marketing updates	Marketing messages do not adapt to suit user behavior or needs
All channels work together	Each marketing channel functions individually

Successful omnichannel marketing includes a detailed understanding of customer behaviors and preferences across all buying stages and delivering relevant customer experiences that transcend into a meaningful brand-to-user relationship.

Here’s how you can define your omnichannel marketing strategy:

User behavior elements	Demographics Buying habits Devices and platforms used
User journey stages	Onboarding Engagement Conversions Loyalty and advocacy

How to Use Omnichannel Marketing to Reach Target Audience

The starting point is always understanding your users better. Customer journey mapping can help identify the touchpoints where your target users interact with your brands. It also gives insights into user pain points you can address through your omnichannel marketing.

Here’s how you can use omnichannel marketing to reach your target users effectively.

1. Document user journey

User journey mapping has the following steps:

1. Identify your user demographics like where they live, what they do, etc.
2. Understand user pain points that influence their buying decision
3. Identify the platforms where your target users are during their purchase process
4. Track the conversion path of your target users. This path can be one-dimensional or can be complex with multiple two-and-fro in pages, channels, and devices. Pinpoint the most frequently used paths to create an effective strategy.

User journey mapping helps understand where they are dropping off and why. Simultaneously, you also get to understand your users' points of view.

Customer data is always at the core of your omnichannel marketing. The more you understand your users, the better you deliver relevant experiences.

Damian Grabarczyk, the co-founder of PetLab Co., shares, "We've learned that truly understanding our customers' journey goes beyond just observing their interactions with our brand; it's about crafting a unified experience across all channels. By meticulously documenting our users' journey, we've pinpointed crucial touchpoints and fine-tuned our omnichannel marketing strategy. This method has empowered us to connect with our customers more effectively, whether they're engaging with our content on Instagram and TikTok, seeking advice on our website, or finalizing a purchase through our online store. It's not merely about having a presence on multiple platforms; it's about weaving a consistent, personalized narrative that resonates with our customers at every step of their journey."

2. Implement proper segmentation

Personalization is a key element in omnichannel marketing. In other words, sending relevant and right messages to users across every buying stage at the right time is important.

Segmentation helps split your target audience into groups based on shared browsing preferences and behaviors. You can create more tailored messages for each segment with proper segmentation and user tagging.

For instance, the Indian retail brand Shoppers Stop segments users based on tags like First Citizen Member, further segmented into location, gender, and demographics. As a result, this WhatsApp message pops up during Durga Puja (the biggest festival for Bengalis in Kolkata), which is highly personalized and localized. As you can see, it incorporates Bengali festivity sentiments while giving a clear message to its users.

Once you have segmented your users, the next step is to blend in your omnichannel marketing, i.e., to align your marketing channels and content with your segments.

Some ideas to do this include:

• Create email campaigns for new leads who have subscribed to your newsletter, booked a demo, or downloaded a form.
• Opt for social media messaging to engage with interested prospects who follow your brand on social media.
• Plan webinars to educate users who have moved down the funnel by one or two steps and are now looking to know your brand better, the problems you are solving, and how they will benefit.

The main takeaway is to create the right content for the right segment and send it across to the right platform.

3. Create channel-appropriate content and assets

Omnichannel marketing is different from multichannel marketing in the way messaging is done. It is not one-message-fits-all in omnichannel marketing. Each channel requires you to modify your brand messaging while keeping a sense of consistency in it.

Create a content strategy for your omnichannel marketing that is agile and scalable. Here are the steps to create an effective content strategy encompassing all marketing channels for your brand.

Align your communication goals:

Have your content goals in place before starting with creating assets. Identify the channels you want to target and take note of the kind of messaging each channel supports.

Build consistency in your message:

While the format for each channel may differ, your message should remain the same. A simple trick is to create pillar messages that can be remodeled and reused on web pages, mobile apps, emails, social media, and any other platform.

Here’s an example of consistent messaging on multiple channels from Swiggy Dineout, a food chain app in India. Message context: Offer during Cricket World Cup 2023.

4. Give device and platform-appropriate CTAs

Similar to how the messaging format differs across channels, the same goes for the CTAs. If you take the above example of Swiggy Dineout, you will see how the CTAs differ in both channels.

In the case of the in-app message, the CTA **Book Now **is prominently displayed on the offer tab. On clicking on this CTA, users are automatically redirected to the list of restaurants running the offer.

In the case of the Whatsapp message, there is a link rather than a concrete CTA. On clicking on the link, users are redirected to the app on the same page that the book now CTA did.

If you note carefully, the messaging words differ but about the same offer. How do you know that? Look closely, and you will see Match Mania, the name of the offer mentioned in both messages. Hence, consistency is delivered with appropriate CTA leading up to the same end goal.

Defining the right CTA is essential to propel your users to the next stage in the funnel. Ensure your CTA does not push your users away but acts more like an extension of the experience you want to offer.

5. Leverage automation tools

Multiple channels and many user interactions can get overwhelming quickly if you are not leveraging automation for your omnichannel marketing. Automation tools can streamline the communication flow across multiple channels. Here's how you can leverage automation:

• An email marketing system can help you schedule pre-set newsletters, promotional content, and follow-ups for one-on-one conversations with prospects/leads. These automated drip campaigns can help save time and reduce manual labor so you can focus on polishing your marketing strategy for better engagements. \

• Automating social listening can help in responding to your brand mentions instantly and raising a ticket for your customer support team to address. Despite being an automated response, this cuts down the wait time for your users. \

• Similarly, chatbots can help answer common queries and attend to users instantly. When you train your chatbot to give out help resources and do the first-level data capturing and enabling, you reduce the user-to-brand friction at the first step. In many cases, automated responses and help guides solve issues without even having a human team member stepping in. \

• Implementing a marketing automation tool can help you segment, target the right message on the right platform, and create user personas critical for effective omnichannel marketing. A marketing automation tool also helps in engaging users across multiple channels at the same time. \

• You can implement task management and integration tools that connect all your marketing apps, letting you manage everything from one central point.

Leveraging automation does not mean ignoring the human touch in your marketing strategy. It is about amplifying your efforts and ensuring you acknowledge your users faster.

6. Test and optimize

User behavior and needs evolve constantly. Thus, your omnichannel strategy cannot be a one-time effort. You need to be prepared for the evolving needs of your target users.

Test and optimize your marketing efforts to get the results you want your campaigns to drive. You can test your landing pages, content, button colors, UI/UX changes, campaign time, and more to deliver a unique experience to your users.

A/B testing may seem daunting initially, but as you discover user data, you will find it relevant and useful.

However, every activity has a hard limit, and testing is no exception. While testing elements and variations is a good way to understand what clicks with your users, you must never over-test or under-test. Before you start testing, create a goal you want to achieve with the testing. Once you are there, stop testing. Avoiding such common A/B testing errors can help in making better decisions.

Over-testing can often lead to incorrect metrics and bring your campaigns crashing down. The same fate awaits if you are under-testing.

Conclusion

The present and future of marketing is a connected world. Omnichannel marketing has the potential to bridge the gap between your target users and your brand through a seamless experience that your customers love.

It is a continuous process that keeps evolving and is spread across multiple data points and platforms. Automate regular tasks and spend more time understanding user behavior. Your ultimate goal is to deliver a superior user experience; omnichannel marketing is the way.