Technology with its rapid pace has blurred the lines between online and offline marketing. The post pandemic acceleration of digital maturity has increased interest in the benefits of omnichannel marketing to small business. Let us explain why.

Today’s buyers will interact with your business at least 10 times on average before making a purchase. These interactions occur on various platforms and touch points such as social media, a customer care call, chat, your website, videos, or other content. The evolution of these platforms and shifts in consumer values means customer behaviour is changing as is customer service expectations. Our customers dictate when and how they would like to engage with your business, and analytics tools allow us to view and measure these behavioural preferences.

When businesses are tracking these shifts and adapting their marketing strategies, they are able to safeguard their market share by maintaining a strong online presence. The new way forward is approaching the customers with the way they want to be marketed on the devices they prefer. This is where Omni-channel marketing comes in.

In this article we explore omni-channel marketing, the benefits of omni channel marketing to small businesses and how to implement it.

What Is Omni-Channel Marketing?

Omnichannel Marketing is the process of deploying marketing strategies across multiple platforms so you can connect with customers and prospects in a range of ways that they see as valuable. When you do omnichannel marketing right, you can offer an enhanced user experience and cohesive brand message that drives people to action. It involves putting customers first and doing research to create a seamless, unified experience.

The primary objective of omnichannel marketing is to create a seamless experience for your end consumer across a range of relevant channels in a profitable way. Customers today opt to get in touch through online and offline mediums like visiting the store, telephone, website, mobile app, or social media. And they can do so with multiple devices including smartphones, tablets, and computers.

One of the biggest challenges for small businesses who wish to implement a multi channel marketing approach, is delivering a consistent customer experience on these channels. This is where an agency can make all the difference. The agency can bring expertise to optimize the marketing plan performance on different marketing channels, improve the quality of content and create a seamless experience for your buyers.

Small businesses know their customers well. The agency is skilled in mining this knowledge to optimize and amplify content across channels to reach and engage with the target audience at each step in the buyer journey.

What are the Benefits of Omnichannel Marketing to Small Businesses

1. Better Customer Retention

By delivering a consistent experience and communication on all platforms, Omni channel marketing builds trust in customers and customers always prefer to buy from brands that they trust. Thus, your business attracts higher customer retention and loyalty.

2. Improved Customer Journey

Omni channel marketing provides data about your customer journey and their behaviour across the sales funnel. With this understanding you can better your performance and minimize drop-out points from their journey.

3. Growth in Revenue

The prime advantage of omni-channel marketing strategy is that it allows you to reach your customer base with accurate segmentation and personalization. The more customer engagement you generate the more leads and conversions you get, and all this results in higher ROI.

4. An Integrated Approach

Omnichannel marketing builds team cohesion toward the common business goals instead of the sales and marketing team each working for different goals. This approach results in an integrated implementation of marketing strategy, where the sales, marketing, customer services, management – all work together toward common goals.

5. Customer Insight

There are several ways to collect customer data like social media, devices, mailing lists, referral programs, offers, IDs to name a few. Studying these channels can provide better insights about how each channel contributes towards your goals. Thus, it helps you to know what works and what needs improvement. This ongoing evaluation, testing and improvement delivers improved customer insights over time, and a strengthening of your market competitiveness.

How to Implement Omnichannel Marketing in Small Businesses

1. Customer Understanding

Small businesses often have a lot of knowledge about their target audience – their preferences and behaviours. There are tools available that can add to these insights by detecting sales patterns, customer trends and complaints. Various tools are employed for different purposes, such as Hootsuite and SproutSocial for social media listening, Google Analytics, Semrush, MOZ, Ahrefs and GetClicky for SEO purposes.

The best tools are not free. However, top digital marketing agencies typically maintain subscriptions to many of them in the delivery of their work. They have in-house expertise with these sophisticated software programs so that working together with your in house marketing team can provide incredible synergy and value to your business growth.

2. Different Marketing Language for Each Channel

Each marketing channel comes with its own best practices. Customers use multiple channels to engage with your business.

It is essential that you customize your marketing campaigns to capitalize on the nuances and unique features of each channel that you invest effort in maintaining. It can be difficult for small businesses to invest the time required in understanding these platforms,  and then maintaining an ongoing active presence on them. A digital marketing agency has a team of experts who know these platforms in and out and can devise a strategy that suits your next marketing goal.

3. Customer Should Come First

A customer-centric approach is what makes omni-channel marketing even more successful. However, businesses can face challenges in developing an effective omni-channel strategy if they are not marketing specialists with this type of relevant experience.

Marketing strategy puts the customer first. In other words, the strength of the marketing plan is hinged on your deep knowledge of your customer’s mindset, values and many other characteristics. Persona development is essential to today’s marketing plans. However most small businesses do not have in-house expertise in the development and execution of persona-based content marketing strategies.

By putting the customer first in the development of omni-channel marketing strategies, performance on each platform will see improvement. The role of the agency is to guide the process, bringing out the best in your internal marketing team, and enabling heightened success across each performance measure.

4. Draft a Single Communication

Omnichannel marketing requires a common message across various media and channels in order to portray a strong brand image. This is achieved by creating the same look and feel for your marketing materials across both online channels as well as the brick and mortar establishment. Each department, from customer service to sales to marketing should be communicating the same message.

Digital marketing agencies such as Asset Digital Communications are specialists in bringing that consistent look and feel to your Content marketing, Social Media, SEO and Email marketing platforms.

5. Build Customer Relationships

The focus of a superior omni-channel approach should be developing long term customer relationships rather than simply achieving short term sales. The goal is to build lasting relationships between your business and buyer.

A good buyer and seller relationship leads to strong customer retention and repeat purchases. This can be achieved by offering personalized products and services, loyalty programs based on customer behaviour. An agency is equipped with various tools available for customer engagement activities, like MailPoet, Mail Chimp and WooBox. This will enable you to nurture your customer relationships with content that answers their questions through the buyer journey.

Conclusion

Push marketing is clearly outdated. Digital marketing is here to stay and the sooner you adopt omni-channel marketing in your business, the faster you will win new customers, boost customer satisfaction and trustworthiness, and gain a competitive edge.

This means creating a powerful communication strategy that is persuasive, consistent and appeals to different buyers in the sales funnel. Nonetheless, it is easier said than done. There are many aspects of omni-channel marketing that need to be perfected to see significant results. Talk to us about how you can align your marketing with a powerful omni-channel approach.